Smart Art

Whether or not you’re grappling head-on with the degree to which you’re interfacing with machines, we all know on some level that artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic notion. AI has already infiltrated our daily lives and turned us into monetized data sets. Don’t believe it? Just ask Alexa or Siri.

“AI is very much at the de Young Museum. Interactive works by 14 artists from the United States and Europe probe the uneasy relationship between human beings and so-called thinking machines—as well as the ways pernicious biases get baked into our databases and software, exploding the myth of objectivity. (The phrase “uncanny valley” was coined by Japanese engineer Masahiro Mori in 1970 as a metaphor for the existential uncertainty humans feel when confronting autonomous machines that mimic their bodies and thought processes.)