The Dawn of Real-Life Robots? Ex Machina’s Scientific Advisor Believes True Artificial Intelligence Is Not Far Off

Did you already watch the film Ex Machina by Alex Garland? It’s one of the best takes on Artificial Intelligence highlighting a twisted version of the Turing Test. A young programmer is selected to participate in a ground-breaking experiment, in order to evaluate the human qualities of a breath-taking humanoid A.I. — an impressive human-like robot named Ava.

A discussion later arose if Ava is really just pure imagination or if artificial intelligence and the singularity itself are that close to becoming a reality.

One of the film’s scientific advisors, Adam Rutherford, wrote a guest post back in 2015 in The Telegraph that essentially concluded that true artificial intelligence is not as far off as we might think, even though the artificially produced human-like bodies are still years away.

So what did he say about the level of human-like intelligence Ava was displaying:

“Ava’s consciousness is drawn from the BlueBook, the film’s version of Google: her knowledge and behavior are generated by harvesting the teraflops of information we reveal about ourselves when we’re using the internet. It’s a brilliant explanation for the generation of her human-level intelligence, and it does have a root in current tech. We live in a world, after all, where every word you tap into Google, every purchase you make on Amazon and every Instagram snapshot you post reveals something about you, and about people in general.”

He then stated that artificial intelligence isn’t likely to achieve any sort of “consciousness” anytime soon, just because AI researchers aren’t treating consciousness as their primary goal. Instead he added that:

“Mostly scientists are building intelligent systems for specific functions. When Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, it was a landmark in machine intelligence. But Deep Blue couldn’t play a single round of noughts and crosses.”

Ava’s physical prowess though is much more of a stretch of the imagination than her intellectual prowess or even self-awareness.

“Ava’s body… is probably decades from realization. Currently, scientists struggle to get robots to do things we find trivially easy: they can drive a car, but not actually get into one. Four billion years of evolution is a hefty head start.”

Of course, science is making bigger advancements in this area by now. The Japanese and even more so, the Chinese are constantly pouring billions into the development of robots.

Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini was revealed recently, showing the world how fast the future of robotics might be upon us.

Nonetheless, the film’s implicit assertion that huge corporations like Google and Facebook would be the ideal candidates for creating dangerous AI might not be a reach and could hold true, especially since Google purchased artificial intelligence company DeepMind some time ago.

“Ex Machina’s Nathan Bates is a mix of Victor Frankenstein, Colonel Kurtz, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg; he is a man who aspires to put himself at the centre of creation. Ava’s AI is drawn from his earlier creation, BlueBook, a simulacrum of Google. So guess who bought DeepMind for £400 million last year? And guess who also picked up Boston Dynamics and a suite of other robotics start-ups in the space of nine months? Google, one presumes, is acquiring these robotics and AI firms to help build evermore sophisticated technology in order to… well, we don’t know.”

This article was originally published on pionic.