EVIDENCE OF THE rise of the technology industry in California is impossible to miss: streets clogged with ride-hailing cars, shiny $5bn company headquarters, soaring housing costs and homelessness. Yet the deeper effects of Silicon Valley’s companies, which capture and direct much of humanity’s attention, remain hard to fathom. Like distant gods, invisible algorithms power online services, selling users products and political candidates by mining private desires.
The term “uncanny valley” is used in robotics to describe a feeling of revulsion at machines that too closely resemble humans. This sense of discomfort has changed as artificial intelligence shifts from robots to neural networks and other sorts of machine learning. The “uncanny valley” today, says Claudia Schmuckli, the show’s curator, is “a technologically induced terrain of existential uncertainty and dread”.
A room-sized installation called “The City of Broken Windows” by Hito Steyerl, a German artist, explores how discrimination is built into policing and security software. Like a neighbouring exhibit called “Shadow Stalker” that criticises the “predictive policing” algorithms disproportionately used in poor neighbourhoods, Ms Steyerl’s piece asks who technology serves and who it does not.