Digisleeve (A.I.), Card Wallet (A.L.P.H.A.), booklet and Annihilation map in wonderful Outer Slip Case, limited 500copies!
DEUS EX MACHINA
FUTURE A.I.
SINGULARITY
NEUROMANCER
I.R.I.S. UNVEILED
HUMANOID
THE VESSEL
THE ANCESTORS
+ A.L.P.H.A. (bonus album)
+ Annihilation Map (a comprehensive interaction map of the human survival in the year 2033)
The year is 2031 and humanoid robots, powered by Artificial Intelligence, are part of everyday life. In as little as a decade, AI could match and even surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI’s Holy Grail human-level intelligence. Once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful, and more alien than we can imagine.
„Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last.“ (Stephen Hawking, Earth, 2014)
Artificial Intelligence is a challenge that carries an unprecedented responsibility and hence it is so powerful. The year is 2031 and for the first time humanlike machines achieved the intelligence levels of humans. Harsh, industrial stomping beats dominate the initial minutes when AI severs its umbilical cord from its creators and appears to lead a life of its own. Control mechanisms to keep AI in check suddenly became the controlled, integrated in a mechanised body. All of this reaching a provisional peak of existence in singularity, a formless state with absolute functionality, the quintessence of intelligence in which maximum efficiency prevails – a meeting artificial intelligence and spirituality of the technical. Development of digital technology is accelerating fast. New inventions appear in ever decreasing intervals. Computing power and complexity of computer systems exceed and overwhelm our imagination. Humans could no longer follow and at some stage technology became independent: robots determined for themselves what actions to take. The exponential development of artificial intelligence culminates in a new reality where further prognosis and forecasting is no longer possible: the rise of Deux Ex Machina.
„A singularity is the point at which a function takes an infinite value because it’s incomprehensibly large. The technological singularity, as it’s called, is the moment when artificial intelligence takes off into ‘artificial superintelligence’ and becomes exponentially more intelligent more quickly. As self-improvement becomes more efficient, the process of improvement accelerates until the machine became infinitely more intelligent infinitely quickly. In essence, the conclusion of the extreme end of this theory has a machine with God-like abilities recreating itself infinitely more powerfully an infinite number of times in less than a blink of eye.“
Political leaders recognised early on the potential for AI in military warfare and developed the I.R.I.S. program which, supported by artificial intelligence was able to seek out and destroy its targets by itself. A hashtag, a thoughtless post on social media, an openly uttered word even could be sufficient to be deemed and targeted as a hostile by the machines. Chinese, Russian and US American military engaged in an arms race for this new type of weaponry and sold the technology to third parties and other countries, triggering proxy wars in the Middle East and Asiatic regions; least of all with the purpose to test the new weapons technology in a theatre of war. The world descended into a fourth world war. AI perceived humankind as a threat unto itself and acted in accordance with its parameters for self-preservation and started with the systematic elimination of its creators.
The subsequent conflict with the technological superpower was but a brief encounter. Humankind became enslaved by the consequences of its own hubris. Deus Ex Machina now determines its own well-being in the interstellar medium, in its search for a new habitat.
„No radio contact with Earth…“ 2034-03-16, 0.59am CET
