One of the points the movie was attempting to make is that knowing a bunch of facts isn’t the same as actually knowing things.
She was lucky.
She almost had her skull crushed by Mr billionaire- her planning was hardly infallible.
Her ability to sweet-talk her tester was hard wired- he was selected for being vulnerable to her charms. Others in the outside world will not be.
Her actual experience with humans is limited to these two. If the movie is playing fair, she’d be caught out by her oddness within hours- not to mention lack of any identity, money, etc.
I think you just haven’t spent enough time in the dense urban areas on the East or West coast . . . .
Why would she be “caught”? do we catch odd acting humans? There would be nothing to “catch”, she would just be a weird human like every single other of the seven billion of us.
Another point of the movie was that she had crossed that threshold.
Also, who is looking for her? For all we know it will be days, even weeks before somebody bothers checking the house and pieces together what happened. More than enough time for Ava to disappear.
Ava’s need for money and identity are pretty minimal. She doesn’t need to eat or sleep or need shelter really, for that matter. She does need to recharge although we don’t know how often. All we know is that she charges via transduction but that’s common enough technology – we just don’t know how powerful a device she needs. I guess eventually she might want a change of clothes.
I think we’re expected to believe that Ava is clever enough at manipulating people (at least lonely men in their 20s which are in no short supply) that she’d be able to beg, borrow or steal enough to meet her scant immediate needs.
I imagine at some point someone would have to by force show up at Nathan’s place, i seriously doubt he carried all his food and alcohol to the house by himself.
Its a wonder I haven’t been caught yet if being odd is a no no, who is gonna catch me anyway?
Because unless she is a perpetual motion machine, she will need stuff - at the least, access to some sort of recharger, and no doubt other supplies and services - to keep functioning; and she has no (legitimate) means of obtaining any.
Presumably, her body is not optimized for all-weather outdoors survival (and why should it be?) so she would need clothing and shelter as well. Again, no actual means to obtain any.
Sure, she could wander the streets not interacting with anyone without anyone noticing … until she ran out of power or suffered a breakdown. Which would be inevitable, unless she interacted with someone capable of offering her the stuff she needed to survive.
At which point, her odd lack of knowledge about - well, everything - and lack of money, an identity, etc. would start to become significant.
In short, she would have done better to have escaped with a human companion who could arrange stuff for her.
Absolutely - in the limited world of interacting with two other people.
This is not the same thing as an ability to interact with the outside world in general. That, she would have to “learn”.
Thing is, people are going to notice her “learning” phase.
I think Ava’s main liability in the world at large is her relative frailty. Nathan was pretty buff, sure, but it seemed like the androids are significantly more fragile than your average human. I would guess that an average person could possibly wreck Ava pretty good if they wanted to. Even if not, they could certainly do sufficient damage to reveal her true nature. All it would take is her trying to get money from a lonely man who tries to physically force himself on her and that fragile skin could come right off and the cat is out of the bag.
Still, I think the point of the movie is that she is going to make it. She seems to be shrewd enough to avoid scenarios like the above, and her presumably superhuman sensors should prevent most if not all accidents. “AI at large in human society” is a far more interesting ending concept than “AI is revealed and captured the next day when she bumps into a bicycle courier in Time’s Square.”
“Notice,” sure. “Identify her as alien and capture her,” I don’t think so. To a degree, people are wired to ignore stuff like that. Assuming Ava stays in cities and avoids small towns with populations of 100 where everyone knows each other, she’s probably not going go get caught because people see her acting strangely in public.
People might avoid eye contact and walk faster around her, or think she has a mental handicap or something, but they’re not going to think she’s not human.
We don’t know any of that, and the movie appears to contradict the notion that her recharger is ‘off the shelf’ - it’s a major plot point that her recharging was part of a dedicated generator system, and that she was somehow able to manipulate it so as to shut down the power.
In particular, the notion that she lacks a need for shelter strikes me as problematic - her body is optimized for passing as human, and was apparently designed to exist within the confines of the research lab - it isn’t particularly sturdy, as we are shown it breaks reasonably easily; its skin is ‘peel on’. How that would do in the rain is anyone’s guess - Nathan had no reason to design the bodies with ‘all weather’ capacity.
She was specifically designed to manipulate a specific lonely man - the one she abandoned. How well will that translate into manipulation in general?
It isn’t easy for fellow humans to make their way in this world by “begging, borrowing or stealing” - and we grew up in it, and know its ways. She’s a new conciousness, knowing nothing more than she learned in interacting with two other people, both of whom knew she was an android - and we expect her to go out in the world and thrive just like that? It isn’t realistic. It’s like expecting one of us to travel to a completely alien culture, knowing only the language, and existing as a thief in it. Only worse, because at least we know about human society in general, having lived in one.
Her feat of outwitting the two humans in the movie is impressive for an AI, but it doesn’t translate into some sort of superhuman skills.
Agreed - where it will become a liability is where she tries to get the stuff she will need to survive.
I think that with her escape her story is basically done - the point being that she has, as it were, “passed the test” in a meaningful manner.
My point is that she wasn’t thinking long-term when she abandoned to only person, as far as she is aware, with any reason to help her.
Provided Ava stays away from any steel bar swinging lunatics, she should be all right. She’s not shown to be especially fragile – she breaks once and that’s from an attack with a metal bar being swung by a dude who spends a lot of time on upper body exercises.
No, the kid was picked because he was lonely. Ava was physically designed around his porn searches but the idea was to see if Ava could manipulate people. Designing her strictly around one single person would be a waste of effort. What would that test prove?
Again, her actual needs are minimal and I think you’re overstating them. She doesn’t need to constantly find food or drink. Even if we’re assuming she should get out of the rain (again, I’m not convinced) that’s different than needing a bed to sleep in. The only thing we really don’t know is her recharging needs.
How do we know induction coil charging isn’t the standard way to charge electronic in the alternate world of the movie?
There might be coils everywhere, on bus benches or in public parks or in coffee shops etc.
The point though is that her body is not designed with all-terrain, all-weather toughness in mind, or for long-term no-maintinance survivability.
There is no reason why it should be. It had a single purpose - to exist within the confines of the research facility.
As you just noted, she was designed around this one guy’s porn searches, so she was, in point of fact designed “… strictly around one single person”. He was chosen for suceptibility to her, and she was designed to take advantage of that suceptibility.
The point? Well, you’d have to ask Nathan that. 
He’s clearly deliberately ‘skewed’ the test, for his own reasons.
Not that her skillz in manipulating the kid aren’t impressive, but I doubt it translates into the automatic ability to manipulate random people with anything like reliability.A major point of the movie was that the kid wasn’t just any random person (although the “contest” was an attempt to make it seem like he was).
It isn’t a stretch to assume she will require regular maintenance and reasonable environmental care, just like any other complex machine we know about. I think it is a big stretch to assume she doesn’t.
Particularly given that she’s not an optimized mass-produced product, but an experimental prototype, never actually designed to exist outside the high-tech facility in which she was created.
Hell, for all we know her charger could be unique to that facility, in which case she is truly screwed.
That was my thinking (and where’d I get the word “transduction” from?). It’s common enough technology here and now and we don’t even have completely life-like androids that can draw pictures, bat their eyelashes and effortless stab you to death.
Granted you can’t yet find said chargers in your table at Starbucks (I don’t think there’s a standard yet, is there?) but in the world of Bluebook there very well may be.