Not SIFF: Ex Machina, and artificial intelligence
Sun, May. 31st, 2015 08:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scarlettinaWent to a not-SIFF movie on Thursday evening with a group of friends, many of whom are science fiction writers, all of whom are SF readers; we call ourselves the Ladies of the Movies. We get together once a month or so for dinner and a film. Ex Machina was Thursday night's movie, about a young guy--Caleb--who wins an employee contest to go and work for a week with his high-tech employer's reclusive genius CEO. It's like getting an instant all-access pass to Mark Zuckerberg (whom I suspect was one of the models for the character). Turns out that Nathan, the CEO in question, is working on a new, secret project, an artificially intelligent female android. Caleb is there to administer the Turing test (a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human). But Nathan is a dishonest operator and his creepiness factor is pretty high. Trouble ensues.
The film is stylishly made, the effects quite fine, and the performances right on the mark. None o the actors are well-known, which was nice for me; their identities didn't interfere with the film's universe, which I thought was a plus. But the plot holes are many and obvious, especially to a group of women who read, write and edit SF for a living. That said, we're still discussing the issues the film brought up. My question, which we're hashing through, has been: if part of being human is displaying empathy, and an AI's creator is an empathetic human, why would said creator make an artificial intelligence, knowing that it will understand its limitations and possibly be driven crazy by them? Where is the compassion in such an act?
So it's not a terrible film, just a not-great one. But it's provoked some interesting discussion.
The film is stylishly made, the effects quite fine, and the performances right on the mark. None o the actors are well-known, which was nice for me; their identities didn't interfere with the film's universe, which I thought was a plus. But the plot holes are many and obvious, especially to a group of women who read, write and edit SF for a living. That said, we're still discussing the issues the film brought up. My question, which we're hashing through, has been: if part of being human is displaying empathy, and an AI's creator is an empathetic human, why would said creator make an artificial intelligence, knowing that it will understand its limitations and possibly be driven crazy by them? Where is the compassion in such an act?
So it's not a terrible film, just a not-great one. But it's provoked some interesting discussion.