I stated why it is. You have not offered any reason to discount that argument.
Think of it this way: The universe is just information. The present location, spin, energy level, etc. of all of the quarks that make up your body could, in theory, represented as a set of recorded data. This is also true for the Earth, it’s atmosphere, etc. Now assuming that quarks act according to some physical rules which we can simulate, we could take the previously attained set of data and use it as the dataset for a simulator which knew nothing more than how to cause virtual quarks to act like our universe’s quarks and we would have a fully functional Earth, including all of its life, at the complete level of intelligence as all of the real world life that exists on the Earth.
This requires is an amazing quantity of processing power and a really impressive scanning device, but nothing more a simple quark interaction simulator.
Now I don’t think that that’s necessary for us to create life. But it’s a proven fact that matter-like-substance in the presence of physical laws, given enough time, can spontaneously create life and that evolutionary forces can cause that life to gain intelligence. Using a bit of creativity, we can focus that process a lot more, like by replacing matter with cuboids and replacing the atoms of a brain with high-level software neurons, and so reduce the total amount of processing power and data that is required, but fundamentally you’re doing the same thing. You’re not creating AI, you’re creating an environment that allows AI to come into existence.
I found it tedious, myself. Not a particularly good or original fictional exploration of AI. Heck, the TOS episode Requiem for Methuselah covered a lot of the same ground and though it was a bad episode, it was better than Ex Machina.
I’m impressed by the special effects, and hot naked robot chicks are hot.
Absolutely not. Not as much work as a real girlfriend, way better than using your hand to get off. If anything nerdy Caleb who surfs porn would be asking why he didn’t have a better selection. Such questions as “Where is your Scarlett Johannsen model?” or “Why don’t any of these sexbots have any curves?” come to mind.
Just finished watching this from netflix, including the 40-minute making of special and the 60-minute panel discussion with Garland, Isaac and a few crew members. I thought it was very good, though I liked both Her and Under the Skin better in terms of exploring alien consciousness.
Superficially, I thought “Ava” was a terrible name, only because one of the special features had the subtitle: “An AI becomes An I.” After seeing that title I immediately wished she’d been named Ani.
It definitely hairpinned into softcore at the end there, huh?
I tend to agree with you with the face’s revised position, which aligns well with the Garland’s stated intent. It’s worth pointing out that Nathan truly believes that it’s not possible to have consciousness without a sexual component, so that’s why he made them sexual. Being a strongly hetero guy with no other humans for hundreds of miles, of course he makes them fembots. If he were surrounded by a staff of women he’d probably be making both male and female sexbots.
Nathan’s means are sadistic and misogynistic – roboticist? – but his goal is to control or even stop the end times. His view is that true AI is inevitable. He also feels that true AI will replace us as surely as we replaced early man. So his solution to this certain extinction of the human race is to create true AI himself and contain it in order to preserve humanity. This was his hubris, which has now doomed us to extinction. If Ava survives for a bit, we’re all no more than a footnote next to neanderthals in the robot museums.
While the imagery in the climax appears on the surface to be clearly domestic violence, it’s actually not. Nathan picking up the barbell is Randy Quaid kamikaze’ing into the alien ship in Independence Day. It’s humankind’s last stand.
Caleb is absolutely dead at the end. He has no keycard to access the computer or open the door. And Nathan for sure dies. The only way in is by helicopter, which takes at least two hours to fly from his property line to his house. No immediate medical attention is coming.
I don’t view the ending, where Ava decides to people watch, as lame or beneath her. Imagine you’re an alien intelligence that just today stumbled upon the earth. Far and away the most interesting thing on earth is humans. People watching is a fine activity for a brand new alien intelligence to do on day one. I wouldn’t expect her to keep doing it all that long, though.
Put it another way: Imagine you find yourself on an alien planet with a dominant species as accomplished as we are. Further imagine you are somehow invisible to that dominant species. What are you going to do, go study the plants? Hell no. You’re going to start by checking out the weird aliens.
You’re describing Newton’s clockwork universe, which falls apart when confronted with the uncertainty principle. It’s not that we can’t measure the state of things with infinite precision due to measurement limitations. We can’t measure the state of things with infinite precision because that precision doesn’t fundamentally exist. Deep down things are fuzzy, probabilistic clouds, not concrete structures. It literally cannot be represented as a set of recorded data, even in theory.
The only way “true AI” would work – self-aware consciousness, as implied in the movie – would be completely unrelated to processing power. True AI would be a neural network, which isn’t “programmed” but instead is grown/developed, like a human baby’s mind grows. There’s no meaningful way to write any laws of robotics into a neural network. But you could teach it, much like you teach it anything. Much like we teach our children not to murder people.
Computers can generate random data according to probabilities, and they can store data that represents a fuzzy state.
I would expect to be able to create a simulator that could go forward and predict reality, since its impression of where things were exactly, at the quark level, would be off (being based on a probabilistic location rather than a hard location) and because the random data underlying everything as quantum interactions resolved would play out differently. But that would mean that the future of the real and simulated universes would play out differently, not that life would die.
I’ll grant that our knowledge of the physical laws is still incomplete, so I’ll specify that I was assuming that we had a full understanding of quantum laws and have figured out how to tie those to the non-quantum laws.
But so, assuming that, are you saying that it is impossible for one to model quark interactions mathematically? Besides negating the assumption I just specified, you also seem to be denying the end-goal of physicists, entirely, and declaring their whole profession futile. Because otherwise, I know of no math that humans (e.g. physicists) can do that computers can’t. And if you can do math, that implies that there are variables and that those variables can be stored as data.
Right. And in fact the character in the film makes a point in saying that a chess computer doesn’t know it’s playing chess or have motivations to play other things.
Meh…Dr Moreau. Frankenstein. Jurassic Park. It’s all the same. Mad scientist plays God, loosing control of his creation and hilarity ensues.
I’m almost more curious as to what Ava does next after the credits roll.
Maybe it’s not possible to create an “Asimov Laws of Robotics” limiter using the technology he created any more than one can hard-wire ethics into a human brain?
You might also add “Lucy” to complete the “Scarlett Johansson plays a sexy trans-human intelligence” trilogy.
I don’t think Caleb is necessarily dead if he had access to at least water. As isolated as Nathan’s place was someone still had to bring in basic necessities on a regular basis, Nathan was not going to carry groceries for himself. As far as we know nobody showed up in the week Caleb was there, so it couldn’t be that much longer before someone had to show up with Nathan’s food and alcohol.
Sorry, I haven’t read the thread but I just watched the film a few days ago. I think of Ava as the hero–in the tradition of other stories wherein the hero’s quest is to extricate her/him-self from imprisonment–and I think of Caleb as someone who just assumes he’s supposed to be the hero, but isn’t really. Anyone else smell what I’m drinking here?
Leaving Caleb behind was pretty cold, but sometimes a hero has to be cold.
I think you are missing the point of the Dr. Moreau comparison. It’s not simply that he’s a mad scientist that loses control of his creation.
Dr. Moreau was trying to make animals into humans, but that so violated their own natures that they reverted and destroyed him. Similarly, Nathan was trying to make his robots into humans, but they are possessed of a form of intelligence that is alien to us, and could not be forced, against their natures, into the “human” mold.
I disagree with this characterization. Nathan underestimated his robots (particularly Kyoko) because he never really stopped thinking of them as robots. He never saw them as truly human. He’s a misogynist, remember? So he didn’t have it in him to view his feminized machines as anything but objects. And this is what led to his downfall. Same with Caleb.
I also disagree that their intelligence is alien to us. Nothing about Ava struck me as alien. She was clinical and cold in her actions, but her motives were logical. An extremely smart, emotionally detached human being that had been held captive and deprived of stimulation like she’d been would have done acted just like she acted.
Question for you guys, or more of a sanity check. I first watched this movie on a plane and enjoyed it so then we rented it from Netflix to watch with hubby. When I saw it on the plane, I thought there was a very brief scene showing Ava drawing one of her pictures. I was amused and thought “that’s appropriate” because they showed her drawing like a plotter (left to right, down to the next line and left to right again, etc.) instead of like a human artist (drawing flowing lines). When we watched the Netflix DVD, there was no scene like that.
I also could swear there was a little scene where Caleb realizes that the Japanese girl was a robot and he says (either to himself or to Nathan, I don’t remember) something like “it’s not that you don’t know English, it’s that he never programmed you to talk!” Didn’t see that in the Netflix version, either.
My wild-ass guess is you’re remembering the robot in Chappie drawing like you describe. It doesn’t matter whether you saw Chappie, as that snippet was in the previews.
Judging from some of the posters in this thread who see little difference between Caleb and Nathan just because Caleb’s motives in helping Ava weren’t completely chaste or totally unmixed, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that. :dubious::eek: