This Movie’s Realistic AI Scared the Shit Out of Me
When I watched the trailer for Ex Machina, I was excited. It wasn’t just the uncanny and attractive robot Ava, either. There were androids, AI, Turing tests! This looked like the scifi movie of my dreams. But when I saw Ex Machina recently, I was terrified. Because it told the truth about what AI might become.
From this point forward, this post is chockfull of spoilers. You have been warned!
I should’ve expected as much. After all, the trailer hardly hides the fact that something goes very wrong in Ex Machina’s isolated artificial intelligence lab. It’s also the kind of plot twist we’re primed for in a world where some of the smartest people on the planet are warning us that computer scientists’ grand ambition to build a true AI is just plain dangerous.
Of course the robot was going to turn into a psycho killer, leaving broken mirrors smeared with blood and bodies on the floor. (Sorry, I told you there would be spoilers.)
The day after I saw Ex Machina, I took a trip to Carnegie Mellon University, where I met with a handful of robotics professors. The trip had nothing to do with the movie, but I ended up spending the next few days letting snake robots climb up my leg, watching soft robotic arms wave at me, and letting autonomous robots give me tours of campus.
The whole time, I was waiting for one of these machines to pull out a kitchen knife. And yet, the one common thread that tied Carnegie Mellon’s diverse robotics projects together was the pursuit of safety.
Maybe robots aren’t the most disturbing part of the AI dream. What left me speechless after Ex Machina wasn’t so much the ghastly robot-fueled violence. It was the sheer horror of feeling human, confronted by a ghoul of my own making. But in the movie — and perhaps in real life — the AI’s not the ghoul. The ghoul is data collection.
Wait what?
Let me back up a second. Ex Machina is premised on a very believable scenario. A spindly young coder (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a contest to spend a week with his company’s founder, a reclusive and maybe mad billionaire (Oscar Isaac) who got rich by building a sprawling search engine called Blue Book. Once he arrives, the young coder meets and sort of falls in love with the allurng android Ava (Alicia Vikander).
Sound familiar? Well, the Google and Facebook references are obvious. The Wittgenstein reference is entirely unexpected, but thankfully, the film explains it: The Blue and Brown Books are notebooks the Viennese philosopher compiled in the mid-1930s.
This nod to old boy Ludwig is a gentle reminder that this film is dripping with philosophical references. Which makes good sense in a movie about the definition of consciousness.
A search engine is the perfect starting point for an artificial intelligence since it’s based on the algorithm-fueled organization of real time information.
Google already has some pretty fucking impressive AI software. To build a machine that thinks like a human, however, you have to comprehend how humans think. And quite conveniently, the collective search history of the entire world is a great window into the human psyche.
This still isn’t the hard part, though. As the maybe mad billionaire character points out, the traditional Turing test isn’t even that difficult for existing AIs. Robots are already writing news articles and taking care of kids, so the challenge isn’t specifically language-related. The challenge is making a robot look and act and move like a human.
Human behavior, expressions, and emotion are beyond nuanced. And these things certainly aren’t easily communicated through search terms.
http://sorendreier.com/this-movies-realistic-ai-scared-the-shit-out-of-me/
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