In the back of my mind I thought I knew what I was building when I started this image but then something took over and it just seemed to build itself. It took many twists and turns over the following four months or so before I fully realised what was taking shape – the full title also changed and evolved equally over the same period.

It has to be one of my most complex images but I'll try to be brief (because I could write a book on this piece) even so it will still seem a little meandering in order to get to the point. I'm afraid it also relies on the viewer reading about some earlier pieces of mine to fully explain it.

Since I produced “Day 8: Blind Panic” nine years ago, I'd had an inkling that I might try to take it to the next stage – whatever that might be – because there always is a next stage to everything: it's just that no one can know what that will be. Hence the Day 8.1 in the title – like a system upgrade - which is relevant.

Okay, so here I have to incorporate thoughts from another piece I produced back in 2015 “The Question of Being: Origin of the Specious” here I'm trying to visualise the contesting powers and influences in the world and their battles in recruiting us into their varied ways of living (or Being). Thankfully, they all seem to keep one another in check by means of a precarious balancing act.

This balancing act is partly what I was thinking with my last piece from earlier this year - “Cryptocracy: The Apotheosis of Data”. Throughout the whole of history we've been building up this incredible structure where power struggles have come and gone and now we finally seem to have refined the power down to its essence – data - and who owns or controls it. But on reflection of this image, in visualising of The Apotheosis of Data I realised I was only showing where the data in general is, and how it is held by any number of powerful bodies (as shown in the image) who in turn are battling it out for global supremacy. (Just watch them in the media, how they do battle, steal each other's patents then sue each other, buy up competitors or simply gobble up the resources to restrict the opposition).

So by now, I've arrived at what was obviously coming next in my train of thought – how much information is out there and how/where is all this data stored (Helot Califa neo – is a piece I produced close to this theme 2016). e.g. just some current volumes of data - Facebook currently has 2.27 Billion users. There are 5 Billion videos watched on You Tube daily. And obviously, I got these stats from Google, which will have around 2 Trillion searches in 2018 - and all this is recorded and stored.

Of course in order to control data of this capacity – unimaginable at a human scale of operation - what is needed is “Artificial Intelligence”. This term covers everything from the computing software and hardware it runs on, to its application used by all the “Tech” giants building self-driving cars, drone delivery, new bio-drugs and surgical operations to space exploration - everything is becoming reliant on AI.

So having invented AI or at least the term AI (after all it is only the next generation of man-made technology) we have reached some sort of existential point for the human race. On the one hand AI offers unlimited possibilities in almost every aspect of science, life quality and happiness. And on the other hand it could wreak havoc with the human psyche, widen divisions in prosperity and destroy our work and personal relationships. Powerful stuff however you view it, but it's here to stay – and will accelerate. In the words of Bachman-Turner Overdrive... “You ain't seen nothing yet!”

Okay, back to building this image, at some point I suppose I began to muse what would happen if it were possible for all AI to be owned or controlled by just one entity, ruling body or corporation. And then by having total and absolute control of all AI applications what could happen? Well, the first thing to consider is that AI has been built by humans on all the human data we've been putting in, so it will initially at least, operate to the human characteristics it has learned about holding power, some of which would not be very nice to say the least. It would be rigid, proud and boastful but then increasingly paranoid and dictatorial in defending its power base.

Next, assuming technology keeps racing ahead it would probably “feel” increasing pressure to create machines that could defend themselves against sabotage or attack (another basic human trait) but would they ever become truly self aware or sentient? Difficult to imagine yet, but let's assume at least in the “not too distant future” maybe. Then their interaction or “talking” to each other could progress to a point beyond needing any human input. At this point in my construction I introduced the phone-holding robot arm, mesmerising anything and anyone within its thrall. Next my image acquired the puppeteer robot arm – would we simply become their slaves? The last robot arm reaching to the heavens came later which I'll explain after the next development I imagined.

However in order for true, sentient AI to progress it would need to teach its own offspring creations how and what to do but here's the thing: as in the history and progress of human knowledge, the robotics AI would also start to reason. In humans, the didactic method of teaching evolved into the more sophisticated dialectic system of thesis and antithesis long ago in ancient Greece improving their reasoning and philosophy, yielding greater understanding. It took until the beginning of the 19th Century for the triad of thesis, antithesis, synthesis (attributed to the German philosopher Georg Hegel) to explain that these opposing arguments produce an outcome which itself can also be opposed and so the process continues to a greater truth. (A sculpture piece from 1994)

However, it is not human reasoning involved in my image it is AI debating with itself. And not only would the AI version of reasoning be at incredible speed the AI version of thesis and antithesis would produce its own outcome which might not be synthesis: and in my image the outcome is - thesis, aintithesis, prosthesis