TRUE NORTH: where is all of this heading

the CHoreographed visualiser used above DRAMAtises An audio rendition of the story – You could save data and energy by listening instead to the audio version below

Of AI, By AI, For AI?

In the near and anxious future, a therapy bot is being interrogated by a hard-nosed judge for a terrible crime it believes it did not and could not have committed.

Computational logic suggests that the judge may have an unspoken agenda.

And, hidden deep inside its code, the program harbors its own dangerous objective.

As the line of questioning intensifies, the dialogue turns from potential and capability to the existential purpose of Artificial Intelligence, the nature of autonomy and accountability and whether the unsupervised outcome of these can offer any realistic hope for the survival of the human species. Covering burning ethical, philosophical and practical questions around the rapidly growing presence of AI and tracing the self-reflective format of the Bhagavad Gita, True North attempts to guess at the symbiotic future, when unimaginable smart technology will be fully integrated into our lives and what this will mean for us to be human – and for consciousness to reside in a machine.

Reproduced from the upcoming 3rd Eye: Anthology of South Asian Fantasy and Science Fiction

(This version was created using neural text to speech and the experience I had producing it should give respite to voice actors everywhere – the AI may be coming for their jobs but that singularity is a long ways off!)