“We will become vastly smarter as we merge with our technology,” says Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering. “Let there be a digital future, but let it be a human future first,” counters Shoshana Zuboff, author of Surveillance Capitalism, an analysis of “the scandalous abuse of digital capabilities” in our information civilization. Today’s philosophical assessments of the role of technology are torn between such extremes. The same is true of the worlds of art and architecture, inhabited as they are by techno-optimism as well as extreme scepticism. At a moment when we can no longer imagine a world without technology, it is vital to ask how we—the human inhabitants of this planet—imagine the world and its technologies?

Are Friends Electric? is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Moderna Museet within the context of its exhibition Mud Muses: A Rant about Technology.