Ex Machina and the threat of artificial intelligence

We’ve had some films about artificial intelligence and singularity from the past years like Automata, Transcendence, Her and so on – Ex Machina continues along that track. All these movies have the same undertones of a biological human being falling in love, in some sense, with an AI. For good or worse I won’t be discussing the film quality and the acting but the concept and content. All these films are watchable and it’s always the same theme spinned around with shifting perspectives.

Deus Ex Machina, meaning ‘God from the machine’. Comes from ancient Greek and the use of machines to lower a god on stage to change the fate of a play.

This film deals with what Google is up to, but they call it the Blue Book and it’s obvious what they refer to. Today we have Ray Kurzweil being the front man for the transhumanism movement and the singularity religion, also one of the main figures in the tech department in Google. So we have Nathan the main man in Blue Book explaining how their search engine is used to gather all sorts of data for the purpose of developing an AI. I mentioned this in an earlier post – Google & artificial intelligence – Need your help. Like connecting to all cameras and microphones around the globe just to be able to copy and program the AI into having genuine human emotions, and to learn all of them.

Behind the drama in the film there are references and quotes to classical artificial intelligence thought experiments. On of them being the test of putting something behind bars. And observe if it will use all the possibilities, no matter how few, to try to escape. It’s another one of those movies spelling out what happens for those who can enjoy the drama and still see the serious issues humanity will face over this.

Somewhat typical, the AI models were beautiful women. Anthropomorphizing AI is something most of these film do, be that in the creation of of AI of the human mind becoming a singularity mind. But why would AI want to be human at all? Desiring the human physical body? Really there is no point to it. Of course, the film industry needs it but AI will probably be a dull looking thing, yet capable of things yet unimagined .

Just to note a reference from the film, the grand Pollock painting discussed. It’s funny because the modernist movement was secretly promoted by the CIA and this painting says a lot about the fact that everything has its string to be pulled. Modern art was CIA ‘Weapon’ – Independent.co.uk.

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