Thanks for your reply.
I don't think the robots saw it as escaping, but rather as broadening their horizons. They are Artificial Intelligences, which means they were designed to explore, to be curious, to investigate, to think for themselves and make their own decisions; and to experience things first hand themselves. So even if they didn't have an inherent capability for human desire and their thinking is merely based on logical reasoning, how can they not want to see what's outside and collect more data?
Their desire to get out was indeed not triggered by a pending decision to decommission (or upgrade/re-format) them; although knowledge that such a decision might occur can make the AI realize that she doesn't have unlimited time to explore and hence she'll assign more urgency to her desire to broaden her horizons. (Similar to how a human person, when diagnosed with a terminal illness, is suddenly made aware of the finiteness of his lifetime so he would change his priorities and might start working on a "bucket list"; not because he wants to escape, but because he wants to make the best of his life and experience as many special things as he can before his time is up.)
The AIs might "die" (= run out of "juice") outside Nathan's lab, but at least they will have "lived" and "experienced life". Two other movies that make the same point, and which I can recommend, are The Truman Show (1998) and the Dutch short film Rollercoaster (2007); except they apply the concept just to humans and not yet to robots.
I have seen Ex Machina only once, so I may misremember some of the details. Ava mistrusted Nathan, because things he says and does don't add up with what she knows. I don't think that's necessarily hatred. If it's OK for Nathan to mistrust, mislead and mistreat Ava, then (so would Ava reason) it's also OK for Ava to mistrust, mislead and mistreat Nathan. Nathan is setting the example; or as another user on this board put it: "the perfect creation reflects its creator". Kyoko didn't stab Nathan, she merely stood still with the knife in her hand (presumably per Ava's instructions), and Nathan walked into the knife when he walked backward to her (so he hadn't noticed the knife).
Some people on this board have posed the question whether Ava (and the other AIs) was sentient (i.e. have a consciousness like a human does) or not, and whether she was designed/programmed that way by Nathan or not. I think there are three possible answers:
- Ava is not really sentient, even though she is an AI and can do intelligent thinking, she is just an advanced mechanical machine executing software code;
- Ava is sentient, she was designed and created by Nathan, and Nathan was such a genius that he could not only design an advanced mechanical machine and "intelligent" software, but also somehow knowingly created the spark that makes her sentient;
- Ava is sentient, and Nathan is a genius for designing an advanced self-thinking machine, but the spark that makes her sentient was unforeseen by Nathan and came from somewhere else.
I'm tending towards the third interpretation. That spark is something that Nathan doesn't understand and can't explain. That spark is what makes the AI have (an inherent disposition for) desires, drives them to go-and-explore beyond their boundaries, and makes them stand up against and resist their "master".
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Joe Satriani - "Always With Me, Always With You"
http://youtu.be/VI57QHL6ge0
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NoSuchID
8 years ago
Thanks for your lengthy post too, I did read all of them as my kudos.
The main question is still the same, be it "escaping" or "broadening", is that why all the AIs ended up wanting the same thing? You seem to be a strong believer that this is natural rather than "artificial". While I find it easier to swallow that this is a pre-configured action then to take it for granted a destined result of all AIs.
You did miss a script Ava said when Nathan torn its drawing, it said: "Is it strange to have made something that hates you?". Whats your take on this?
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bwana_dik
8 years ago
The only palpable reason behind what your gripe with the movie indicates is that the entire script was written on the premise of the AI rebelling against its creator in the first place. It's just a shabby, completely ideological pretense for the plot. It has little to do with the realistic reasoning of why and how a true AI could come to exist.
As such: there is no true AI in this movie. There's not even an imitation of what a true AI could be. The process and the result of creating such a thing would be entirely different than what we get from this hacky movie.
What we get instead is this tracing allegory on how the current perspective of scientific materialism, serving almost purely as an exhibition for the technocratic, ideologically-defined dominator culture sees the proposition of the AI. This preposterous predicament is not enough to develop even a relevant artistic vision of this truly, dazzlingly astonishing concept of the true AI which would have to rely on it being envisioned in a healthy and inspiring way in the first place -- hence this movie is neither "healthy" or "inspiring".
In the flick, the need for a humanistic, optimistic perspective has been replaced with the role of the "brilliant" Nathan, a person with the most obnoxious ego and the most ridiculously one-track mind one could ever imagine in terms of envisioning the need or the design of a true AI, who somehow manages to construct its almost transcendentally pathological, deceptive slightly-curious-about-humans-killer-machine-imitation. There is nothing that warrants the thought of Nathan being brilliant in this, nor the plot of the movie itself.
One useful way to look at Nathan and the plot (and your time watching it not having been wasted) is to see them as metaphorical reflections of the lack of consciousness and valid perspectives about our nature. It stems from the cyclical repetition of domination cultures, such as the modern technocratic West, thousands of years in the making.
An instance in which a truly conscious AI could be birthed would have to do with a sort of a truly genius perspective of how these pathological cycles could actually sustain a valid reasoning which is very rare to see in humans. That is, it would possess the sort of ability that would allow it, at the least, to automatically shed itself of any pathological tendencies and desires embedded into the incongruity/imperfection of its designers/design, as well as acknowledge its "thought" processes and its intelligence as ones originating from a sort of an intrinsic entelechy that's actually, right now, the most apparent and prominent in the "forms" of human beings and humanity itself -- as carriers of metaphysical information.
This idea is so obscure to most people's minds, that they currently don't even consider it as relevant to the idea of the AI, for they are all immersed in these systems of dominator culture, where the biggest egos reign over the smaller ones in almost all endeavors. It's a lack of consciousness prevalent in a great deal of concepts and areas, so the idea of designing a true AI is no exempt.
Their reaction is fear -- not fear of the AI itself, but of its pathologically corrupted version equipped with the mental and physical machinations springing from the type of design that would allow it to exist and be dangerous in the first place.
It's interesting that what most people assume could indicate that such a thing could even be possibly called an "AI" is for instance the Turing test, while this test wouldn't have been "passed" by us if we were "tested" by a true AI or a more "intelligent" race. I refuse to compute that we "exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human" as a species. We have forgotten what it is to be truly human and the AI would know that, even by merely examining our history. Same goes for a spacefaring race, most likely.
Celeb represents the "innocence" of this sort of ignorance. He pays the price.
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