Learning to See: Hello World!

When activated, an artificial deep neural network is like a newborn baby. Just as the new human brain is fitted with millions of synapses, an artificial intelligence that has just seen the light of day already has a complete internal architecture. But at the moment that it "opens its eyes," it doesn't have any frame of reference yet. Every piece of information it receives is new and unintelligible. But the system learns with incredible speed by recognizing patterns in what it observes and comparing all new forms of input with what it has seen before. In this way, it expands its worldview in order to contextualize future observations. With the help of live input from cameras, artist Memo Akten investigates how machine learning works. The way in which the computer trains itself sheds light on the development of the human brain. But when does learning become understanding? Is this a purely human capability, or is it something computers will one day also master?