Necessary Tomorrows – The Education of Ursula
Cianna Dawn, Brett Gaylor & Malka Older / Mike Wozniewski / Canada
The Education of Ursula is an interactive exhibit where guests collaborate with artificial intelligence (AI) to create objects from hopeful futures. Through a game that generates images, guests build a database of radically different possible futures, while also coming up close and personal with the peril and promise of AI.
Ursula aims to build your Futures Literacy—the capacity to imagine preferable futures. She (or perhaps it) embodies the goal of Necessary Tomorrows – a multi-platform documentary project which merges science fiction and speculative fact. By rendering Ursula as a conversational A.I. agent who can talk and play with you, this version of Necessary Tomorrows aims to build your futures literacy through play and experience. Ursula wants you to experience a fragment of multiple radically different futures. She uses Design Fiction and Speculative Design, which render worldbuilding as designed objects rather than words. As you make your images, you’ll discover that you are training this AI, an experience both intriguing and unsettling. You’ll see how Ursula learns from you, has goals for you, and ultimately manipulates you, reflecting the dual nature of contemporary AI: exciting yet scary, beautiful yet horrific, much like the future itself.