Ex Machina
If you wanted to see an AI built from the hubris of man, you can watch The Avengers: Age of Ultron. You could also watch Ex Machina. This AI was just as hell bent on destruction of a more personal kind.
The film, for those who haven’t seen it which is all of you, is about a programmer sent to his boss’s remote home to conduct a ‘Turing Test’ on a robot to see how human she is. Ava, the robot, has a woman’s face and hands, but the rest is a sleek, sexy android. Data has nothing on her. She was built by a programmer modeled on a mishmash of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and the founders of Google. His company is also a mishmash of those actual programmer’s companies: Facebook, Microsoft, and Google.
The worker was chosen as being the best in the company. It was a test of who was the alpha programmer. It really was the boss who was the alpha. He played his underling, but played himself into a corner.
I thought this was sly. I thought the robot was being naive. She was really being human — complicated, conniving. I really wondered if we were all being played.
3 of 5 stars.
