Hearing voices
The AI tech powering a dream generator, a John Wyndham game, and a theatre show
An AI dreams. But first, it needs to know what to dream about. We press the microphone button, and speak the first words that come to mind: “the human heart”. Project Electric Sheep drops us into a freshly baked dreamworld, where a roughly sketched medieval castle sits in the dark and the rain, surrounded by the occasional igloo and torii gate. If there’s no obvious link to our chosen topic in the setting, then we have considerably more luck with its denizens.
A woman called ‘Angina Pectoris’ tells us that we have a black box in the middle of our chest, “full of wonder and beauty and pain”. When asked what her heart is like, she reveals that – in a cruel stroke of nominative determinism – she suffers from chest pains. Shortly after we find ‘Atrium’ sheltering from the rain under an awning. He’s keen, unsurprisingly enough, to talk about the heart. Has he ever eaten one? “No.” Why not? His answer is remarkably convincing.