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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

This looked extremely exploitative to me (specifically, crystal magic style exploitative) but apparently it is just Art so I guess that's okay. I've known some family members that are easily taken in so I generally find supporting this sort of stuffs continued existence to be in poor taste since even if a particular device is constructed to be parodizing it tends to end up being used to relieve people of their savings.

Other than that I enjoy that it's trying to pull some non-western traditions into an exhibit being displayed in Vienna.

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Yeah - as interesting as it is as an art piece, I hope nobody takes it seriously.

But hey, satire is at its best when you have to squint at it for a few beats to tell that it's a joke. As long as they don't actually sell stuff like this with the same marketing, what's the harm?

It will reinforce the beliefs of gullible people about the underlying superstitions. They might not purchase it, but they will read it without realizing it is satire, and move on feeling that such things exist as evidence for such beliefs.

Isn't that the whole point of subversive art? If nobody would fall for it, how could it ever be taken seriously?

I don't think so. You have it backwards.

The point of this piece isn't to fool "superstition believers", but to draw a comparison between black-box algorithmic governence and superstition.

You're reading a level of malevolent mischievousness into "subversive art" that I don't detect.

And what about those gullible enough to have confidence in commercial AI efforts? Law Enforcement's facial recognition, automatic sentencing, insurance premiums, and a whole slew of other black-box algorithms govern our lives.

Vast swathes of the modern economy are no less superstitious than these toys.

At least, that is one thrust behind the piece.

> Subjective judgments and biased datasets can easily be turned into objective measures and potential truths, which will then be embedded in devices around us.

So you see, it's not intended to fool the gullible-vis-superstition, but to unfool the gullible-vis-technology.

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