I’M HERE TO MAKE SOMETHING SUPER POTENT, but fun, too.

This series of people by recycling cans are my daydreams of what every day life in a consumerist society might look like once we live with, use, abuse, reject, and recycle embodied Ai. I’m painting robots! But not just robots: What will we do when the trickle down of technology has us occasionally upgrading to new versions of domesticated embodied Ai? Will we recycle the discontinued humans? Will we consider a scene with a free robot in the alley ordinary? I’m painting the robots that warrant a Craigslist add that reads:

Free! Curbside. Just put her out this morning. Wife upgraded to a different model, but this one works in a pinch. The right limb is less flexible, but a good reboot will likely improve it. If this ad is still up, then she’s still out there. Don’t call or text. Don’t knock, just take her away! 

The futuristic images of my paintings also look backwards to our history as humans, and how we tend to discard people, assuming they are not worth much, as in the case of slaves, immigrants, homeless, disabled, elderly, or born-but-unloved children. Will used embodied Ai robots set out for the trash truck pickup, like a vacuum that needs a tune up, which the owner cannot be bothered with scheduling, represent a new frontier of how we use and abuse humanity? I hope that my paintings are not prophetic. I hope that I am way off the mark of what our future with Ai looks like. 

Does it matter? I believe it does, because at the end of the day, cruel actions affect the perpetrator as well as the victim. I don’t want our society to be filled with people indirectly effected by cruelty. The indirectness of cruelty toward embodied Ai will seem ugly, but benign, unless we give it some thought.