Ethics and Safety of AI pertaining to Ex Machina
Ex Machina is a movie that is grounded in AI and the ethics and safety that surround it. The premise of the movie is that Nathan, the owner and creator of this universe’s Google, invites Caleb a talented young programmer in his company to his private secluded estate. Here Nathan is working on ground breaking AI technology that he calls AVA. He wants Caleb to perform the turing test on the AVA, who is built to look like a human and decide what he thinks of it.
Since AVA is nearly sentient the movie explores ethics of holding her in a box for all her life and the idea of destroying her, and the old prototypes when a new version of the AI is created. The movie explores how the AI can be manipulative and controlling of humans to the point where is is harmful to humans as a species. Nathan remarks in the movie that in the future AI will look back on humans the same way that we look back on the first upright walking apes, primitive.
In the movie the way that AVA is built is only briefly explained, and the movie is set somewhere in the near future so technology is a bit more advanced than it is currently. Her mind is explained to be built from a type of jelly so it can adapt to what it is learning. She is said to have gathered he base intelligence by using Nathan’s version of Google, Bluebook, and also from analyzing people through their smartphones that are connected to Bluebook. This way of learning isn’t out of possibility in today’s world. Its kinda a simplified way of explaining what Google did to grab addresses off of buildings in Google maps. Google used captcha to employ the help of humans in determining house address numbers until their AI was good enough to do it by itself. The actually physical body of AVA is never actually explained and this is the most unrealistic part of AVA with the current day’s technology.
As a whole I thought this movie was both entertaining and somewhat realistic. The AI in this movie teaches us that AI can be both dangerous and manipulative in order to avoid death. When the AI is designed to fear death, then there is a problem of the AI doing anything for survival. This idea and the realistic nature of the AI is what made me really enjoy this movie. One character in the movie really struggles with the idea of AI being just a machine and sees them to be more close to human, raising the moral question of locking them up and destroying old models.
