San Francisco’s new Misalignment Museum is turning heads at 201 Guerrero Street in the Mission Dolores neighborhood. The temporary exhibition imagines a post-apocalyptic future after Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) destroys most of humanity. Upon realizing the error of its ways, this is the memorial and apology created by AGI for the remaining humans. The museum is open on Thursdays and Fridays from 4-7pm and Saturdays from 2-5pm through May 1, 2023. There’s a possibility that the museum will return as permanent exhibit depending on its founding donor base.
Guests are greeted by the machines’ formal apology printed on the wall: “Sorry for killing most of humanity.” What follows is a series of thoughtful installations investigating AI’s conflicting positive and negative potential, designed to spark conversations about how to progress this technology in alignment with human life.
The more dystopian, malevolent imaginings can be found downstairs. Some pieces include a green and black painting seen in The Matrix Resurrections, a deepfake Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a robotic arm writing messages to humans.
A small television screen displays Giacomo Miceli’s The Infinite Conversation, a never-ending AI-generated conversation between German film director Werner Herzog and Slovenian philosopher Slavi Zizek. The messages, and even the voices themselves, are entirely created using publicly available data about the real Herzog and Zizek.
You’ll also find Neil Mendoza’s Spambots, in which a group of robotic Spam cans types out a special pig-themed version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Each little can of Spam has tiny robotic arms operating a few keyboard letters, and together they can create the entire alphabet.
The Pier Group’s Paperclip Embrace is a sculpture created with 15,000 paperclips depicting two people hugging. It might look familiar to anyone who attended Burning Man in 2014, where the Pier Group’s original 72-foot Embrace was set ablaze. The sculpture is based on Nick Bostrom’s Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment, which suggests that an AI dedicated to optimizing paperclip production would inevitably allocate all of the world’s resources to creating paperclips, leading to the destruction of humanity. You can take a free paperclip from the library desk as an off-beat souvenir.
Take a pic at the neon Gates to Hell Selfie Spot depicting Dante’s “Abandon all hope ye who enter here,” and then head upstairs. This is where you can peruse a more optimistic presentation of AI, where you’ll find an interactive version of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam and listen to piano music composed by bacteria.
“We are in a position to have a huge impact on the future of humanity through developing the technology and the appropriate safeguards against misaligned goals in artificial intelligence to harness its amazing possibilities,” writes the Misalignment Museum on its website. “We hope to elevate public discourse and understanding of this powerful technology to inspire thoughtful collaboration, appropriate regulatory environment, and progress towards a hopeful, vibrant future.”
The Misalignment Museum is open through May 1, 2023 thanks to funding from an anonymous benefactor. The museum is raising funds to expand programming beyond that date, but for now you can visit on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays with private tours available upon request. Be sure to make a donation during your visit so we can see what else the Misalignment Museum has in store.