Dávid Biró – Popup Window

Dávid Biró’s exhibition offers a summary, as it were, of his research in recent years. The showcased works reveal the trajectory of his thinking as well as his relationship to technology: his curiosity is mixed with scepticism, as he inquisitively searches for blind spots, models modes of operation and explores potential scenarios. He plays with the machine, even treating it as a partner, while asking difficult questions about our human culture. One such question is how to define the face and use logical parameters to describe it to a machine. What type of spot or shape can be recognized as a nose, and what can only be seen as an eye? What happens if the person to be identified is wearing glasses or a burka, covering a significant part of their face? At what point does a body part cease to be a face? What is more, algorithms are taught our cultural codes about the workings of our world. Boris Groys describes artificial intelligence as a zeitgeist machine, which functions as an extension of the human intellect. At the same time, the digitalisation of knowledge does not mean that the AI that is based on it will arrive at the right conclusions. What good will a seemingly infinite corpus of knowledge be, if AI still ends up perpetuating the prejudices of humanity? There is a race on: not only with respect to the growing capabilities of ever smarter machines, but also with respect to creating AI that is smarter than us in the “right way”. The question is whether we can create a form of super-human intelligence that multiplies the best of our knowledge, rather than our fallibilities and weaknesses. In the end, if we find ourselves unhappy with what artificial intelligence is becoming, we only have ourselves to hold accountable. (Vanda Sárai)