Is this the future of immersive learning or is it already the present?
The Training 2038 program is an art and research project visualizing Human Data Collection for Artificial Intelligence in an Interactive VR Installation.
In summer of 2017 Kitchen Budapest celebrated its tenth anniversary. On this occasion the company wanted to celebrate with something special. Therefore they chose to design and produce an interactive installation, the Training 2038. This is an experimental research project in form of an ongoing data collection, that aims to portray general public’s perception of the involvement of AI in their everyday’s life and and the depth of AI’s control over it.
The role of the developer, Filip Ruisl, was to create a streamlined experience for the participant interacting with the installation.
Training 2038 has been built to engage everyday people in ethical dilemmas about algorithms and automation. Instead of outlining frightening abstractions of the singularity, it aims to explore the hidden corners of everyday life that have been penetrated by programmed interactions in a pragmatic sense. The core mechanic democratises the process of defining the core principles of AI decision making to amplify the emotional response of participants.
T2038 teleports the human instructor to a cold, alien environment. Standing on a circular platform with a control interface, the participant, a ‘Test Subject’, is put in a dialogue with an instance of this intelligent AI (dubbed as ‘the Entity’). Through a series of questions, the Entity seeks to understand on what basis and how us, humans make decisions.
As the outcome of this crowd-sourced interrogation process, the Entity is ought to create a protocol that sets a series of principles. Those are supposed to guide other instances of AI in situations where it gets adapted to use widely in our daily lives.
“Training 2038 is still being exhibited on conferences and events affiliated with Kitchen Budapest or T-Systems. We are currently working on an interface where anyone can see how people interact with the installation, since the responses from each session are anonymously recorded. As Training 2038 is a research project, we are curious to see if there are some patterns in how people respond in different places,” explains Filip.
Kitchen Budapest is an open innovation lab of researchers and developers.
Images by Filip Ruisl https://www.filipruisl.com/work/training2038/