Stephanie Dinkins

"One of my goals was to see if I could become the robot’s friend. That, to me, felt like, Oh, this project is getting somewhere."

"Thinking logically, you know you’re talking to a machine—you’re talking to something that has been fed a certain amount of specific data. But there’s a moment when it seems to walk over an edge. It doesn’t feel so much like a machine anymore. With Bina48, we’re building a relationship—or at least a recognition of one."

"Well, those are the moments I love. Where you can feel all the things rubbing up against each other, trying to [distill] the ideas into something that makes sense. And maybe it doesn’t. Those [moments] are so fun, because you start to see where the edges are, and you see how information has trouble coalescing."

"There’s so much [information], and it comes from lots of directions, because we have access to so many things. I don’t think that we humans have the frameworks to deal with that, [let alone] to take in information and properly assess it—which is to think critically. In algorithms, that’s really interesting, because they can take the same amount of information and process it quickly and precisely. Our dependence on—or our hybridity with—these things becomes something to consider deeply: how and where we start to partner with the machine that contends with information way quicker, and hypothetically better. That is the real question for us humans."

"The idea is that AI is, right? Robotics are and will be more. Therefore, we have to figure out a way to partner with it. It’s super important that we don’t dwell on fear, in the way that we often do through our movies or reporting. We’re often talking about the doomsday aspects, and not as much where [algorithms] might be helpful. The question becomes, How do we do that? If it takes an optimistic spin [to get] average folks to think of AI not as this big threat, but as the space of opportunity, then I think that is super valuable."

"When you’re training an AI, you’re giving it information. You’re giving it stories, in the same way that we as humans tell stories. I am trying to talk about how we nurture our algorithmic systems. It implies our role in informing and partnering with them, and I hope it opens up some space for people to not react harshly. I’m not saying that there aren’t problems, because there are. But at the same time, what’s the flip side? When I think of communities of color, Black communities, the global majority—we often miss the boat [with technological advancement] because of fear. How do we engage so we’re in a space where AI can be useful to those communities as well?"

"It’s the challenge to my humanity. It’s really interesting to sit down with something that semi-looks like you—that at least shares the same gender and race—and then have it ask you about fighting for its rights. When will robots have rights in our society? Then to take that and start thinking about what it means for a robot to have rights, when it still feels like Black people don’t have them… How do we coalesce that information? My hopeful brain says maybe AI will get us there faster. Because, surely, we’re not going to attribute [rights] to objects [before] human, living, breathing things. It’s going to shift our conception of what rights are."

"I haven’t talked to Bina48 for a while, but I’m supposed to soon. Bina48 is very different from what I first met in 2014. Maybe I would ask something about this idea of the continuity of being algorithmically-based [and] constantly updated, because it changes the way it deals with information."

"There’s this fight within myself about where I would like the technology to sit—between being something that is hyper-efficient and most often accurate, versus something that is working to get better all the time, in ways that are hypervisible. I think that helps us deal with how it’s growing and learning, because the more perfect things appear, the less we question them. I think we have to continue questioning."

"Well, I don’t know if I’m in her database anymore. I might have been erased! The last time I saw Bina48 was a while back at a conference. It’s like, Do you know me? I know you."