Art is ever more useful as a vehicle, not the only vehicle, but one possible vehicle for reflecting back to us the changes that are happening in our society. This can be through visual art. It can also be through film or literature or music, but art has an essential role to play and is an essential part of the conversation. With digital technology specifically, there are so many things that are changing about how we experience the world, from how we communicate with each other to how we learn, to how we remember. We’ve adapted so quickly to these new technologies without always thinking about the longer-term implications of that, or what it might mean for future generations, the way we’re producing and collecting data. So, art can also play a role now in helping us think about the ways in which these technologies, while very beneficial and convenient in some cases, are also potentially problematic.

One of my projects that deals with questions around technology and ethics is a project called the Moral Labyrinth, and it’s inspired by a concept that’s become popularised in a time of artificial intelligence, called the value alignment problem. This essentially questions whether and how a technology will act in accordance with the values of the society that it serves. Now, this is a very difficult challenge because there are many different values. There are different cultural values in different societies, and even as individuals, we have many different values that are not always in alignment with our other values.

In the case of AI, these technologies are being programmed by very specific people in specific contexts and often are used in completely other contexts, not necessarily taking into account the values of the individual people in that community. Even when it’s not something that’s made in Silicon Valley and shipped across the world, it’s still a problem because of our own competing and conflicting values and the values that get embedded into that particular technology. So, what the Moral Labyrinth does is create as a starting point a place for people to question their own sets of values and where those values come from.

You are meant to think about them and reflect on them as you walk to the centre of the labyrinth and then back out. In a traditional labyrinth, you travel a path and come out where you began, but you have undergone some kind of journey and experience. The goal of this is really to encourage people to start reflecting more critically on their own value systems, because what most people realise in walking the labyrinth is that their answers to certain questions conflict with their answers to some other questions, even when they’re just having this internal dialogue. That’s really important to realise, because it encourages a certain kind of humility that often we don’t have when it comes to our belief systems and a certain compassion and maybe more understanding for other people’s belief systems. It also elucidates the challenge of value alignment. If any set of values are meant to be embedded in a system, clearly it’s going to be challenging if, even as individuals, we don’t have a coherent sense of values.

So much of the work that we’re doing as scholars and thinkers in modern and post-modern society is around answers: conclusions, studies, something that’s linear, fixed and conclusive. Art is kind of the opposite: art opens up possibilities; art, successful art, in my opinion, asks a good question and doesn’t provide an answer. What that does is enable viewers to interact with the art and think critically about what their answer might be or how they might interpret it. That’s space for interpretation, which is, and has always been, essential to what art is, and something that’s not really encouraged in other domains. I don’t think art unilaterally is a solution to the world’s problems, but I do believe that it’s really important to have an avenue to open up these questions that don’t have answers. Some of the most important questions we ought to be asking right now don’t have answers. One other thing I’ll add is that the incentive structure in our society, in most societies, is set up for answers and not for questions that don’t have answers. Those kinds of questions make people uncomfortable, understandably. Sometimes we’re spending our energies on the wrong things, so making sure that we create and hold space for these hard questions that may not have an answer for 50, 100 or 1,000 years – there’s a really important space that that opens up.

There are a number of things about human morality and humans more generally that I have learned through the process of creating the Moral Labyrinth. One is that good intentions are not sufficient for good systems or good outcomes. It’s a common fallacy that if you mean well, then you’re not doing any harm, and that is not the case at all. One example that’s actually from the labyrinth is a question that says: is it wrong to kill ants? It sounds like that’s really just about killing ants, but one of the examples I use is: if there’s a little kid on the sidewalk stomping on ants trying to kill them versus a mother and her child walking down another sidewalk, enjoying the sunset and accidentally stepping on ants, from the ants’ perspective, it’s the same thing. It’s not the intentionality of this little boy who’s trying to kill the ants that matters. It’s the fact that the ants are still getting stepped on, and ants in this case can be a bit of an analogy for humans and human flourishing. It doesn’t require that we be intending to do harmful things in order to actually have harmful effects. That’s one of the main things that came out of this labyrinth in this experiment: good intentions are not enough.