Imagine your employer setting you up with an electrifyingly hot date with strings attached, literally and figuratively. You are getting paid to make small talk with a beauty extraordinaire and be judge to what could be Humanity’s ultimate and maybe final achievement. The screenplay by Alex Garland imagines Humanity’s ultimate blind date — with an artificial intelligence that equals or exceeds the potential of human beings. Consider the movie in light of the real technological march towards artificial intelligence and the Singularity.
Alan Turing, imagined the test that could determine if we had achieved the milestone of equality between human and artificial intelligence.
Many movie comparisons can be made with Ex Machina. “The Machine” is one, Blade Runner another but it offers another twist on the emergence of artificial intelligence with human emotions. Once again, the story involves a modern-day mad scientist — Nathan Bateman and a character, Caleb Smith, through which we share the experience of determining if Bateman’s invention passes the Turing Test.
The Turing Test is linked to 2014 box office hit, “The Imitation Game”, the life of the British genius Alan Turing who created the machine that discovered the inner workings of the Enigma machine used by Nazi Germany to encode communiqués to their soldiers in the field. In 1950, Turing wrote, “ Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?” Can machines think and can a test be conceived for which a human could not distinguish a thinking machine from a human?
The test as conceived in the movie is a variation of the test and twisted by the plot circumstances and advanced state of the artificial intelligence under examination. The circumstances are controlled by the mad genius that builds and creates the setting for the test.
Ex Machina is a relatively simple plot. The ending hangs in the balance through the dialogue of the Turing Test between a human and our ultimate creation.
While the meeting of Ava the robot with Caleb, the tweeb, qualifies as a blind date, is it the ultimate blind date? No, it does not represent the moment of the Singularity as first imagined by John von Neumann in 1958: “ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”
The Singularity needn’t involve any humanoid robot and it is much more likely not to. However, Ava represents a scenario that others have considered. With the arrival of a self-aware super-intelligence, its first reactions might be the cold dismissal of its maker which could be by eradication, ignoring us altogether or for an A.I. that leaps quickly beyond our powers of cognition, could permit it to slip between the cracks, either leave Humanity physcially behind or live among us completely hidden from view.
At present, Humanity is now clumsily, as always, primping and prepping for the true ultimate blind date. Billionaires and entrepreneurs are airing their concerns and even investing in prevention or some degree of preparation.
One can imagine the Singularity as a date with destiny; no relation to George McFly’s “you are my density.” Will we take some strange dating advice like Ben Stiller in “…something about Mary”? Is Ex Machina just a premium episode of “Silicon Valley”?
Ex Machina is an entertaining attempt at imagining our first contact with artificial intelligence that matches or even betters us but the ultimate blind date could be far more surreal and far more unpredictable. Ex Machina places the first artificial intelligence matching our own in discrete form, as a beautiful female with, as it turns out, even greater cunning than the average human female. Unleashing her into the world at large, what is now in store for us? We are left hanging.
Leading figures that are predicting and cautioning Humanity about an approaching Singularity have presented a cacophony of scenarios. Here is graphical breakdown of the pathways to our present circumstances.
My Previous Articles on A.I. and the Singularity
The Prelude to the Singularity — our relation with past & present technology foreshadows what could become of us with emergence of artificial super-intelligence
The Singularity can explain why we seem alone in the Universe
