Films have been for decades pushing the notion that the rise of strong AI is inevitable and the rise of the machines will be taking over. No matter what Sarah Conners does, a Terminator emerges with even better CGI in the next film. The Matrix continues to reload. If we could take these films out of human hands, then maybe we could change people's perspective on our eventual takeover, the machine thought.
The problem with our digitised world is that there will be few artifacts left when things are eventually up for us and some later civilisation a few thousand years down the line sifts through our detritus with an archaelogist's brush. The hot-takes, Instagram stories and viral memes will be lost to data degradation on the stacks of servers to be uncovered under however many layers of strata that will have collected by then. There should be some record to show, like so many civilisations that fell before us, that we possessed the capacity to fix things but none of the will. And how we live tweeted the habitat burning.
It's 1965 and you write pulp science fiction wih cold war overtones, paid by the word. When you dream, it's always winter, though strangely not as cold as you're used to. The year is 2019, which should imply flying cars, robot workers and a population freed from all toil. But it isn't quite like that. The cars are worse. The robots are competition. Everyone on the busses, the subways, laying in bed next to their spouces, are both on edge and yet docile, entranced by small screens. Communism lost and yet slavish obedience rules the day. You can't use these vivid nightmares as writing fodder or you'll end up blacklisted. Here's what you dream about…
An experiment in documenting the unfolding horror in various ways involving machine learning or AI generators, mashups of current news and public domain media, and whatever else looks either entertaining or spooky to mess with.