Social credit and The Good Place

When I read about China’s gradually-implimented social credit system, I had trouble figuring out a take. It’s such a reflection of the day-to-day online and social life that I’ve come to accept, just maybe with a deeper Black Mirror-y (Orwellian) resonance. The surprise of it is that its actually being done, but its core idea doesn’t feel like a fresh evil. There’s a lens though that can give it some new umph, and it’s that of an NBC sitcom.

The Good Place imagines a universe in which humans are sorted into an afterlife based on the sum goodness of their actions back in living life. The determining factor for where a human spends their eternity is a score; do something good and get some points, do something bad and lose some points, do something really good and get a bunch of points. I think there is some interesting potential to thinking down this trail. In the social credit system, rather than there being a border between your actions and the system’s response to your actions (as it is in The Good Place and several faith traditions), your choice-action-situation is actively shaped and re-evaluated by the mistakes that you make. The punitive (or rewarding) feedback is shaping people’s environment, influencing the bad (or good) decisions that they make in the future.

Project 3 ideation

I’m currently leaning towards exploring how creating an art piece is similar to creating artificial intelligence, since that piece then stands alone to relate whatever sort of thoughts that you put into it. Below, I’ve listed a handful of ways that this could be reflected in a project:

Concept: art as artificial intelligence.

It’s not that artificial intelligence is displayed as art, it’s that the piece of art itself is acting as a form of artificial intelligence, since it stands alone and interacts with people in very human ways and has biases and decisions that went into the reality that it lives out.

  • It’s a dog with no emotion or action, just that it resonates with the viewer because of the human projections that they put into it

  • It’s a song with “layers,” be those clear or abstracted. The song grows into you and is not static; it is intelligent.

  • A piece of art is a horcrux of ourselves. Traditional “AI” is us trying to make a non-us out of the stuff that we make things with. This is about trying to make something that encapsulates thought in the ways that I do, or in the ways that the viewer might, therefor encapsulating our intelligence.

  • A piece of art is a facade to hold our thoughts and present them in a “way”

Forms:
  • an exhibit with lots of examples, shining new lights on how we interact with pieces of art and how we make pieces of art and how both of those actions reflect the role of AI
Motivations:

I’m thinking a lot about how art becomes separated from the creator, and how it stands alone, and how it standing alone doesn’t let us use it for a particular conversation. We have to craft an art piece to be so sturdy, which is SO almost impossible, and I just want to be able to let my art pieces purely stand within my conversation. There seems to be a power-play thing to an art piece needing to be more than a conversation: why do our thoughts need a physical piece to validate/strengthen them? It’s almost like the game that we play with tech, where we make it because we can and because of the umph that its realization can serve. But making a physical thing out of a thought, while allowing for it to spread, dimmimenate, and reach unseen corners of audience-space, lets it escape from the context of your conversation, which can be a good or neutral thing, but can definitely be a bad thing (Weapons of Math Destruction, that Emmet Till piece (loads of appropriation-spreading stuff in here)).

Concept: thoughts and opinions and viewpoints as clothing.

I’m thinking about the hand-me-down thoughts that I’ve gotten from one of my brothers, and the repulsions that I’ve adopted out of reaction toward others. I’m thinking about how a level of intimacy means we can share clothing, that we are fluidly one. Is this the same level at which our thoughts are fluid, where a suggestion from one of us begins to take shape in the other’s head with so much influence and inherency?