Watching an AI "dream"

As a journalist I’ll try most things, including having 200 hz of LED?beamed into my brain through an intra-nasal brain-machine interface?BMI (yup — v e r y weird) and being?encased in an exoskeleton?to tele-operate a tank (as glorious as it sounds).

In a similar vein, I’ve slipped into?an AR/MR set-up at the secretive HRL Laboratories?(Hughes Research Lab, as in Howard Hughes’ post WWII Malibu compound) to see how rookie pilots learn to mimic brainwaves of experienced aviators.

Then, while in Detroit, I hung out with Ford’s Design/Engineering Team using high-end HMDs in a multi-national "collab" via XR functionalities.

Not much blows my mind these days - until I witnessed an AI “dream”........

I was on assignment for Ziff Davis PCMag, and the AI in question, which was developed at Refik Anadol Studio, can tap into quantum mechanics.

As Anadol told me: "We in our daily lives are not able to see alternative dimensions, but in quantum mechanics [and] quantum computation, there is still a theory of many worlds. And in [the] subatomic world of quantum mechanics, you can see things in superposition, and we are speculating in this project that, perhaps, if AI can look at this complexity...it can see an alternative reality. So simply, we are watching an AI dreaming."

and there it was, I thought - Blade Runner has arrived.

I sent a note to Ridley Scott (I interviewed him at the Toronto Film Festival) as his office is round the corner from me in West Hollywood. I didn't expect to hear back from him. But I just had to tell someone who might understand how amazing it felt to see an AI ideate.