28/05/2022
A Robot Has Painted The Queen
Ai-Da is a humanoid who’s been doingthe rounds this year at various museums and art conventions, to much excitement and bemusement. We got the chance to see Ai-Da a few months back, in Oxford, and we weren’t impressed. If anything, we left with a mixture of repulsion (Ai-Da is styled as a cool young woman, and attempts to make her attractive would be at least passable – in a Desert of the Real/traumatising way – were it not for her enormous HULKING mechanical arms) and mild dread (the humanoid could be yet again another indicator we’re hurtling with no brakes towards a techno-dystopia).
But now she’s gone and done a painting of the Queen. Whether she chose to do this or not or was programmed to (did you know the word ‘robot’ comes from the Slavic word ‘robota’ for forced labour) we’re unsure, but have a look for yourself:
It’s…decent. Not a catastrophic first time in history a humanoid robot has painted a member of the Royal Family, I’ll say. We’ve come a long way technologically, at least: at the time of the Queen’s coronation the first circuit board computers had only just been invented, a design which remained mainstream until the 1960s. Over her seventy-year reign, the Queen has witnessed an unprecedented burst of innovation in computer technology in the UK, including the birth of machine learning and artificial intelligence, forces shaping the modern world as we know it today.
