This TED Talk features artist Rafael Arar recorded live at TED at IBM 2017.

I consider myself one-part artist and one-part designer, and I work at an artificial intelligence research lab.

We're trying to create technology that you'll want to interact with in the far future.

Not just six months from now, but try years and decades from now. And we're taking a moonshot

that we'll want to be interacting with computers in deeply emotional ways. So in order to do that,

the technology has to be just as much human as it is

artificial. It has to get you. You know, like that inside joke that'll have you and your best friend on the

floor cracking up, or that look of disappointment that you can just smell from miles away.

I view art as the gateway to help us bridge this gap between human and machine,

to figure out what it means to get each other,

so that we can train AI to get us.

See, to me, art is a way to put tangible experiences to intangible ideas,

feelings, and emotions. And I think it's one of the most human things about us. See, we're a

complicated and complex bunch. We have what feels like an infinite range of emotions, and to top it off, we're all different.

We have different family backgrounds, different experiences, and different psychologies.

And this is what makes life really interesting, but this is also what makes working on intelligent

technology extremely difficult.

And right now, AI research, well, it's a bit lopsided on the tech side.

And that makes a lot of sense.

See, for every qualitative thing about us, you know, those parts of us that are emotional,

dynamic, and subjective, we have to convert it to a quantitative metric,

something that can be represented with facts, figures, and computer code.

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