Machine Yearning

The year is 2037. You are domestic robots, with limited artificial intelligence, and one thing in common: you want to be musicians! Luckily there’s a band competition on tonight; unfortunately, it’s only for humans. But surely once they hear you perform, you’ll change the world?

As part of my teaching practice, I try to do the assignments set for my students; in this case, they had to make a creative artefact that fit on one sheet of A4 paper, expressing an insight or theme from our trimester, then write a 1,000 word essay reflecting on their creative process. I ended up trying to express the idea of having to continually assess our actions through an ethical framework, inspired by discussions in class about ethical frameworks, charity gigs, who gets paid in the arts and generative AI.

Version 1.2 tweaks some formatting and adds a way for robots to lower their Machine Learning (ML) score if it gets too high.