String Theory
Oil on wood panel, Aurasma augmented reality platform
16 in x 12 in
December, 2018
At the heart of string theory is the thread of an idea that's run through physics for centuries, that at some fundamental level, all the different forces, particles, interactions and manifestations of reality are tied together as part of the same framework.
— Forbes article “What Every Layperson Should Know About String Theory”
Now at the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution, we have created technology such as artificial neural networks, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in order to do our bidding. To create these automations, these puppets to do our work and make our lives easier, we feed them our information and our data to give them knowledge to learn and grow. However, is this price too great?
In recent years, events such as Facebook’s experimentation on users’ emotions and the social media hacking of the 2016 election by Russia have shown us just how malleable our own memories and emotions can be. Our reality is not our own anymore. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, recently said that “our own information, from the everyday to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us with military efficiency”; that these little bits of information collected from us is creating a world in which companies and their machines know us even better than we know ourselves.
Now we live in a world where data has become ammunition in a war against ourselves, from changing our decision and opinions to even changing our thoughts, and one day even performing a kind of mind control on us. As our information controls us, who is actually the puppet? The human or the machine?
Augmented Reality:
