Culture 101's Mark Amery had to borrow a car this week and, while he was driving, pressed a button on the display console and a female voice startled him, speaking to him in Japanese. Mark doesn't speak Japanese.
Yes, Mark muses, the robots are now everywhere, and they want to know your location.
Increasingly, our lives are being mediated by technology. Technology where we want to believe there's a human at the other end. But, is there?
Chatbots simulate converstion with us, algorithms dictate our media, and password gateways impact access to some of the things most valuable to us. And throughout we still tend to humanize, to anthropomorphise.
In their first poetry collection Dear Alter, just released by Auckland University Press Jiaqiao Liu explores "the ambiguities, paradoxes and kinships between human and machine"
In the process he introduces us to everything from telenoid robotic communication devices in rest homes to unwanted translation in Wechat.
Jiaqiao Liu is a poet from Shandong, China. They grew up in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and have an MA in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters.
