20-Sided Elf

“20-Sided Elf” depicts an automated prediction session from Zach Blas’ Icosahedron, an AI crystal ball that houses an immortal elf soothsayer. While tech elite toy with predicting the world’s future, Icosahedron plays with their worldview of the future. Blas modeled Icosahedron after the 20-sided die inside a Magic 8-Ball, a popular American fortune-telling toy designed to offer ten affirmative responses, five non-committal, and five negative. Similarly structured, the elf that lives inside the crystal ball of Icosahedron is trained via machine learning techniques on 20 writings influential to Silicon Valley’s approach to predicting the future, including texts by historian Yuval Noah Harari and Ayn Rand, as well as works of fiction such as The Lord of the Rings and Lord of the Flies. The outcome is an AI elf futurist created by accentuating the often overlooked condition that Silicon Valley’s predictive technologies are bound to material constraints and limitations, as well as ideologies and fantasies of the future.