Reflection of Tomorrow?

The forces of technology and free wheeling financial incentives are dominating contemporary life, and the real possibility of replacing a majority of human employees by machines already rises at the horizon. In 2017 the American technology entrepreneur Elon Musk suggested "Man-machine-interfaces" to enable us to keep up with the ever increasing pace of machines. To me this sounds as if humans have become servants of machines, that machines and the economy have become ends in themselves instead of serving us, instead of helping to secure our livelihood - the only purpose I see for machines and all economic activity. I took this photograph during a visit to the DASA exhibition for work safety in Dortmund, Germany. My three daughters and I went to the special robot exhibit hosted there at the time (January 2015). My 9 year old daughter Liv stood in front of a mirror that reflected the image of a cyborg, and from a certain angle her own face reflected in such a way that it looked as if she was the cyborg. Her sisters also are reflected by the mirror. I chose high contrast black and white editing to emphasize the ominous impression. It made me wonder what challenges the children of their generation might face in their lifetime, with exponentially accelerating technological developments, socio-political instabilities and global environmental and resource degradation. Nothing in our 2 million year evolution has prepared us for our contemporary life - much less for what lies ahead, including, quite possibly, the point in time when the machines surpass their creators in every possible way, as predicted by the AI pioneer Ray Kurzweil: the Technological Singularity.