UTFacultiesBMSEventsReflections: a hybrid exhibition on our digital future

Reflections: a hybrid exhibition on our digital future Part of the 17th edition of the GOGBOT festival

What does our digital future look like? What is the role of humans and machines in it? In the hybrid exhibition Reflections, you are invited to explore offline and online installations and become part of a story about algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. Who are you? Can the machine get to know you? How does AI work? Does your life get better when algorithms ‘optimise’ your decisions? Is your expertise worth anything if machines think faster and perform better? What is left of you then?

The exhibition invites the public to reflect on these questions and on the social challenges we are currently facing. AI experts expect that by 2060, machines will dominate human beings in all domains. But if people are no longer useful because of their cognitive or artistic skills, what are we still needed for? If machines will soon be able to think, calculate, paint and compose better than ourselves, if their stories are more touching than ours, from what do we as humans derive our meaning and what is our new role? In order to be happy as a human being in 2060, it is necessary that we think about our digital future NOW, about the relationship between man and machine and about our human dignity within this reality.

Reflections is a collaboration between the University of Twente and Tetem. The exhibition has been developed within the framework of the Make Happiness project of Tetem and the research project Man and Machine – Learning in the Digital Society by Professor Mieke Boon with students of the Master’s programme Philosophy of Science, Technology and Society, the Bachelor’s programme ATLAS and BMS Lab. The exhibition is designed by artist Jan Merlin Marski.

The exhibition Reflections in Tetem is part of the GOGBOT festival that takes place from 10 to 13 September. The festival's theme is Quantum Supremacy. With this theme GOGBOT explores the impact of the new supercomputers on people and society through an online and offline programme.

Reflections can be visited from 10 September in different ways, see: tetem.nl/reflecties.