This Machine is a Stranger

“This Machine is a Stranger” is a project that emerged from a curiosity to explore how one can navigate life at the intersection of human intuition and the quiet, calculated logic of autonomous machines, questioning how much a person implicitly trusts or mistrusts a machine. As machines backed by artificial intelligence get more and more intertwined into our everyday lives, to what extent can we trust these machines to make decisions and choices on our behalf? The project delves into the unspoken relationship between humans and the machines they’ve created, questioning the delicate balance between trust and doubt, control and surrender.

The project considers what happens when we extend questions of trust and mistrust beyond our human relationships? What if we begin to consider how trust plays a role in our interactions with unfamiliar environments, systems, objects, and even machines? What if a machine was a stranger we were interacting with for the very first time. It probes whether we trust the machine or are we wary of its intentions.

It is set up as an immersive guide taking you through various scenarios or thought experiments evaluating how much you trust a stranger.

You’re a machine

You’re a stranger,

You’re a machine that is a stranger.

Machines are increasingly making decisions that shape how we lead our lives in subtle and sometimes unconscious ways. The machines don’t have complete agency and are largely dictated by the preferences of those who design and develop them, but the boundaries of computational autonomy and agency are expanding.

Machines are starting to make complex decisions that require judgement and reasoning. Their functions permeate our lives from navigating environments, automating tasks, offering advice, driving vehicles, tracking movements to monitoring health. As computational autonomy advances, these systems increasingly challenge our willingness to surrender control and trust the machines. How much a person is willing to surrender control reflects the implicit trust they place in a technology. This project questions this implicit trust a person will have with an unfamiliar machine and evaluates the extent to which the person trusts, distrusts or in some cases over-trusts the machine.

A person finds themselves lost in a dense forest known as “Whispering Woods” with their preliminary devices disabled. Just when they begin to lose hope of finding a way out of the forest, they stumble upon something decidedly out of place: a curious contraption nestled in the grass. A machine with a tiny screen and translucent encasing. This is when they start to interact with the machine. 

The machine is named Gizmo-1305. “Gizmo”, since the function of the device is initially unknown to the user, and “1305”, to represent the initial date of its operation, coinciding with the day of the thesis exhibition. On this machine the user navigates through various scenarios where they’re asked to share things about themselves, trust decisions made by the algorithm and take advice from the machine.

People demonstrate trust in various ways: sharing vulnerabilities, confiding in others their secrets, fears, and insecurities, spending time together, seeking help or taking advice. On this journey the user traverses different ways of showing and assessing trust.