Background
Technology and artificial intelligence are radically changing post-industrial societies and urban environments. Humans work and interact with robots in different areas of life from industry to care work, and various robotics and artificial intelligence solutions are also becoming part of the cultural sector. Smart urbanization brings various artificial intelligence solutions into the urban space and environment, which raises many hopes and concerns in the new, ever-technological situation. The ongoing transformation requires a multidisciplinary opening.
Goal
Our aim is to find out what kind of needs, hopes and fears people have in relation to smart technology and what the future may look like in an urban environment. Our goals are 1) to map how artificial intelligence has been utilized in art and cultural products, 2) to ask what images artificial intelligence evokes in people, and 3) to carry out utopian and dystopian experiments that combine the possibilities of social psychology and art. We seek an understanding of the various possible worlds associated with the advent of artificial intelligence in urban environments.
Impact
The project produces a new kind of empirical research data on the social psychological processes related to the acceptance of modern intelligent technologies and methodologically renews the social science research tradition of human-technology interaction. The visual arts part makes it possible to study technologies that have not yet been realized or that are not based on everyday reality by envisioning new types of future scenarios. The perspectives of social sciences and visual arts are intertwined in the experimental section of the project. The contributions of this project will be both scientific and artistic, leading to both research publications and visual art work.
Funding
UrbanAI project has received funding from Kone Foundation for 2021–2024.