On the TechTO stage ×1
First seen on the TechTO stage in 2024. Every talk is searchable — ask the archive about Michael ↗
In their words
Over 100 years ago, in 1921, there was a play created called Rossum's Universal Robots. It's where we get the word robot from. It was theatre. So here we are standing on a stage over 100 years later, still talking about robots and AI.
I'm going to put forth a philosophical idea of not thinking about these things as tools, but rather as an entanglement between the human and the non-human.
It turns out AI is really good at the domains that we really thought humans were exclusively good at — visual art, music, writing, poetry. What we thought would be automated away first is not those, it's actually the creative fields.
Quick answers
What does Michael Bergmann teach?
Performance at The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University, with a research practice on technology, improvisation and human-AI interaction. He is also associate director of the school's Design + Technology Lab.
What was his argument at TechTO?
That the arts, not the labs, are where a society works out what a new technology means — and that treating AI as a tool is the wrong frame. He proposed thinking of it as an entanglement between the human and the non-human.
Does he build things as well as teach?
Yes. He performs with a multidisciplinary group that includes an AI collaborator as a member, and before academia he worked on corporate and industrial productions out of Worldstage's San Francisco R&D lab.