Mortal Myths for Machine Minds

Introduction This project explores two seemingly unrelated subject areas; the <strong>for</strong>mation of spiritual and religious beliefs, and artificial intelligence. Religious belief can be thought of as a natural consequence of - or pre-cursor to - human intelligence. Our creativity, storytelling and religious beliefs are heavily intertwined. We consider human creativity to be a marker of our sentience and intelligence; something machines cannot emulate. But what if we did create a truly human-level intelligence? Would an advanced computer system ponder it’s own origins and life’s purpose? A true human-level intelligence, built in our image, may favour similar types of myth. This project playfully imagines what such a belief system could look like, borrowing some of the key archetypal ideas from ancient myth and presenting them in a novel way. The narrative is explored level-bylevel. Some of these levels are game-like, and others are purely exploratory. In each level, any number of users are invited to move objects from the computer’s familiar working environment around a tabletop interface, uncovering the story through graphics and sound.