Initiate: Connect

Director's Statement

In Yuval Harari's Homo Deus, the author predicts a future where Siri, or Kortana, become the companions and advisors humanity has tried to live without since it forsook Gods and angels. Initiate-Connect explores that future. The world that came from humanism - people following their hearts - has failed. The time has come again where people must follow good advice. And what advice could be better, than a constant AI companion that knew everything about you? Your calorie intake, your heartbeat, your history of actions and regrets - all this and more. We would not give this technology to our children. Even the most utopian technocrats of Silicon did not give their children smartphones or access to social media while they were in their care. We would give our young this technology at the time when they were coming to the end of their schooling, when they were coming to close to make their own decisions. And perhaps by giving them a helper, our children would make the right decisions. The problems would be many, but for a society hungry for the feeling that it had an answer, those problems would seem insignificant. The main problem would be: this is not magic, as much as we want to bestow on it an air of sacredness. This is just technology. It will fail, and those failures, unacknowledged, will mean people are shut out of the new modes of social interaction. Those who are included will not be able understand what it is like for some who is excluded. Initiate: Connect tells the story of a young woman who, despite ambivalence, would likely go along with this technology. Already an auditory processing disorder makes her school life challenging - she is not actively trying to rebel, she lives in catchup. But what if she did everything right, and yet she heard... nothing. What would it be like to be the person shut out of an experience everyone else was seemingly transformed by? How would you adapt?