In LAUREN, artist Lauren McCarthy, quite literally, watches over you. Through installing door locks, light switches, and cameras, that she controls remotely, she is a human Alexa. Of course, some of the implications here are that LAUREN is not a stand in for Alexa but for Amazon, who actually has the data Alexa collects. McCarthy cites one of her main pieces of inspiration as being how well Alexa was integrated into Amazon’s branding. The AI was simply billed as something to make your life easier, but McCarthy’s project focuses on how strange – and borderline insidious – the device would be if there was not an element of distance created by the inhuman AI.

LAUREN is not limited by programming. If she sees you seem to be walking towards the bathroom, she can turn on the lights preemptively, no verbal command needed. She is smart in ways that humans are but limited in those same ways. She is unable to tell if someone has taken their daily medicine because of the fallibility of human memory. LAUREN’s information isn’t stored in a cloud, easily deleted, but in memory, and thus subject to the oddities of the human brain. Even stranger, the view LAUREN has is inherently distant. She views the subject’s life in a completely different angle, with a completely different set of powers. She has a lot of control, and is so distant, the only thing that would stop her from going rogue is human empathy. And empathy is far stronger but subjective than programing.