Flat Eye presents a possible future which may be neither desirable nor avoidable.

To create this world and make it credible, MONKEY MOON took inspiration from the present. There is no lack of sources: online articles, social media videos, scientific journals and more. On the team's private chat, one observation came up again and again: ""when reality goes beyond fiction."" Things that may seem a long way off or even impossible in the game may in fact have already happened, and some of the game's narrative threads were directly inspired by these true stories.
As archivist for the project, my mission, toward the end of the development process, was to gather all of these articles to create this coherent bibliography. It provides a closer look at what inspired Flat Eye, of course, but also at our present--a time of such rapid, constant change that we don't even realize it's happening anymore.
The goal of this snapshot of the world is to place Flat Eye's major themes (artificial intelligence, the future of work, social change, etc.) in their context. The bibliography sorts articles into several different categories (with frequent overlaps) and provides a summary for each. If you're only after the links and references, you'll find it all at the bottom of the page.

September 2022. The archivist.

Artificial intelligence, or rather machine learning (because that's what we're really talking about: programs that digest huge amounts of data--texts, images, audio and video--qualified in turn by metadata, to establish logical ties between them) is nothing new. It's an old concept. What has changed over the course of Flat Eye's development is the democratization of its use. The tools have been made public, and are increasingly being used in real-life conditions, but users don't always consider the innate limits of AI beforehand.

Salt the data mine.

Published on February 02 2020

Seen by Flat Eye team on February 02 2020

{Content in English}

An example of data sabotage: a grocery cart containing hundreds of smartphones was pushed around the streets of Berlin, making Google Maps believe there was a traffic jam. The application redirected traffic based on this information.

https://twitter.com/jasmith_yorku/status/1223952750402252800

[AI-2] See reference details

AI bias in action

Published on July 28 2020

Seen by Flat Eye team on July 29 2020

{Content in English}

A quick video demonstration of AI bias: a name is entered and identified by the algorithm as female. When the title "Dr." is added to the same name, the AI labels it as masculine.

https://twitter.com/mpchlets/status/1288208469653258240

Note from the archivist: The tool has since been shut down.

[AI-6] See reference details

Trying a horrible experiment... Which will the Twitter algorithm pick: Mitch McConnell or Barack Obama? (thread)

Published on September 20 2020

Seen by Flat Eye team on September 20 2020

{Content in English}

Tweet by computer scientist Tony Arcieri who did a little experiment to explore the racial bias of Twitter's photo preview algorithm (browser and app). He uses portrait-format pictures of Mitch McConnell (white, republication US Senator) and Brack Obama (Black former US President) with a big white space between them. He tries swapping their positions to see the impact (which image is on top, which on bottom). Regardless of positioning, Mitch McConnell always appears alone in the preview.

https://twitter.com/bascule/status/1307440596668182528

Note from the archivist: The Tweet created a lot of buzz and launched a debate about racial bias in algorithms. Twitter has since modified its algorithm. Now the white space in the middle is featured in the preview.

[AI-7] See reference details

Please remember that AI stands for Actual Ignorance.

Published on March 21 2021

Seen by Flat Eye team on March 21 2021

{Content in English}

Tweet by video game developer Hayden Scott-Baron concerning the fact that Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns and that automatic translation tools systematically assign one according to sexist gender biases.

https://twitter.com/docky/status/1373633104192151553

[AI-11] See reference details

References