People don’t have buttons

Since the early days of Artificial Intelligence, researchers have speculated about the possibility of computers to think and communicate as humans. In the 1980s, there was a first revolution in Natural Language Processing (NLP), the subfield of AI concerned with linguistic interactions between computers and humans. Recently, pre-trained language models have reached state-of-the-art results on a wide range of NLP tasks, which intensifies again the expectations of a future with AI.

This sound work, made out of audio fragments of scientific documentaries and AI-related audiovisual material from the last half century, explores the evolution, hopes, fears and frustrations provoked by these expectations.

List of sources: Voices: "The Machine that Changed the World : Episode IV -- The Thinking Machine", "The Imitation Game", "Maniac", "Halt & Catch Fire", "Ghost in the Shell", "Computer Chess", "2001: A Space Odyssey". Soundtrack: Ennio Morricone, Gijs Gieskes, Andre Castro.