Las Vegas is without doubt the mecca of magic. But for a tech magician like me, there is another place of pilgrimage: Silicon Valley.
To put it naively: the place where dreams made of bits and bytes become reality.
And here, too, one topic dominates everything at the moment: artificial intelligence (AI).
So what better destination for a research trip to gather inspiration for my new format “AI Magic”, which premiered at tech events last year? Especially as my interest in artificial intelligence began right here many years ago.
Digital magician Simon Pierro at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino with Kim Silverman (photo: Robert Strong)
Shortly after my appearance on Ellen DeGeneres almost ten years ago, I met Adam Cheyer, co-founder of Siri and a founding member of Change.org.
He is a magic enthusiast himself and invited me to his office in San Jose, where he was working on his second start-up, Viv, which he later sold to Samsung.
After I had performed an iPad show for his team, he showed me something that could genuinely be called magical: software that writes its own software – code that keeps programming itself. A form of artificial intelligence.
Adam said: “Today you’re still the iPad magician, but you should know what the future looks like.” Even though I couldn’t fully grasp it at the time, this was what motivated me to explore the topic artistically.
Anyone who has followed my work over the past few years will have seen the results: I registered the trademark Künstlerische Intelligenz™ (Artistic Intelligence) – a play on words meant to capture a playful approach to new technologies, all the way to artificial intelligence.
Some of the projects that grew out of this were performing magic with robots such as Pepper and ClicBot – for example on my return to the Ellen Show last year.
These were followed by augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiments, such as an app that lets you place my digital twin in your own living room, and the world’s first magic convention in virtual space: Magicians in VR.
For the German hidden-camera show “Verstehen Sie Spaß?”, I apparently reinvented online dating as the decoy. The idea: artificial intelligence finds your perfect partner and projects them as a hologram in the middle of a shopping centre. It’s fascinating to see how much faith many people place in technology.
Here in Silicon Valley I can talk to AI experts and, behind closed doors at big tech companies, see new technologies that really will become reality one day. Among the things that impressed me were Google’s Project Starline, a kind of 3D video call, and a ride in a self-driving car. As a child of the 80s who grew up with series like Knight Rider, I obviously couldn’t miss that.
It’s also a good example of how important it is to recognise early on which tricks lose their impact as digitalisation advances. Where a magician driving a car blindfolded through the streets used to be a huge crowd-puller, in San Francisco you can now order these autonomous, AI-driven vehicles at the touch of a button via an app.
As the iPad magician, my mission over the past decade was pretty clear:
Everyone knows what an iPad can do and what it can’t. And what it can’t do, I make possible – pouring a beer from the tablet, for example.
While an iPad is a prop every audience member has held in their hands, and everyone knows it has no built-in mirrors or false bottoms, with artificial intelligence nobody really knows what it is capable of. It is less tangible. And with the arrival of ChatGPT, it becomes clear that the rules of the game have changed a little.
You could say: technology has caught up with magic – now magic has to catch up with technology again.
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