AI 'changing the human experience'

Artificial intelligence is altering the very experience of being human. My book CODE DEPENDENT is based on a decade of reporting on the impact of AI on individuals, communities and our societies at large. It tells the intimate stories of people whose lives have collided unexpectedly with this powerful technology. Here is an excerpt for the #LinkedInBookClub. In a small copse of conifers outside the Francis Crick Institute in London’s King’s Cross, a dozen young Londoners were preparing to walk the streets in defiance of the city’s surveillance cameras. It was a bright September day, and they were using each other’s faces instead of protest signs. Their tools: pots of face paint and brushes. One of the group, Emily Roderick, had painted a thick black line across her face and part of her mouth, with asymmetric orange triangles on one cheek that matched her hair, and white stripes just off her chin. The make-up had turned her face into a misshapen bundle of random shapes and jarring contours, to evade facial recognition algorithms. Emily and her painted companions gathered and followed their leader for the day, artist Anna Hart. They walked past the St Pancras International train station, through Goods Way, over the canal to Granary Square, a recently re-designed public square with ebullient fountains and a row of restaurants with al fresco diners. There, the group stood, watching the students coming in and out of Central St Martins art college, families splashing in the rainbow sprays, lovers and friends sprawled on the canalside green steps, and then at the tiny cameras positioned around the square, watching, watching, watching. A few days earlier, I had revealed in a news story in the Financial Times that Argent, the property developers who owned this land, had been secretly surveilling passers-by using facial-recognition cameras over the past year. They had been doing so without the permission or knowledge of locals, and working in conjunction with the Met Police. Emily and three fellow artists studying and working at Central St Martins, located right by the Granary Square cameras, had stumbled across my story, and felt violated. They’d assembled the walking collective, known as the Dazzle Club, in the days afterwards. The students and faculty at Central St Martins already clashed frequently with Argent, because of the restrictions the company applied to the use of common spaces in the King’s Cross area. ‘It’s just totally?unnecessary,’ Emily told me, as we sat together in the same spot in Granary Square. They were artists after all, so they wanted to articulate their protest. ‘I’m from Leamington Spa, where there was a whole collective of artists called the Camofleurs, and they’d paint buildings to hide them from fighter planes and submarines during the Second World War,’ Emily said. ‘Time and time again, it’s artists that are finding an alternative way to make these conversations more accessible to the public.’