Ex Machina

    The movie ‘Ex Machina’ directed by Alex Garland is very interesting with the logic and technological beliefs. The plot is about the Caleb smith going to Nathan home to test Ava intelligence who is a robot. First, I would like to say that this movie has so much going on regarding the relationship between people and technology. I believe that if I had watched this movie for entertainment purposes, that I wouldn’t have realized some of the meanings and underlying lessons that we should learn from watching this movie.

    After a brief introduction between Caleb and Nathan, Nathan introduces Caleb to his experiment (Ava) and tells him that he wants him to spend the next week performing a live “Turing Test”. The Turing test was developed by Alan Turing in 1950. It is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit behavior equivalent to that of a human (Wikipedia). Throughout the movie Caleb has sessions with Ava, who has the appearance of a robotic woman with the shape and size but has a human face. During these sessions he asks her questions to try and figure out her level of intelligence. But throughout the questioning, Ava begins to flirt with and manipulate Caleb, while also leading him to believe that she is human. Both Caleb and Ava gets closer and gets into romance which later on in the movie Nathan warns about the same to Caleb that Ava merely wants to escape the house so she is acting in such way and that this also proves that Ava despite being robot has the artificial intelligence capabilities and she has succeeded in human qualities and intelligence while Ava put the allegation on Nathan and says that Nathan is a cruel person and he treats Ava badly. What Caleb later finds out is that Nathan has been working on these humanoids for years and that he was chosen based on his web-search history at work. He was chosen because he was single, had no family, his searches for porn, and Nathan wanted to see if Ava could outsmart him. At the End Ava Leaves Caleb trapped in the house and leaves in the helicopter meant to take Caleb.

The ethical aspect of the movie is that the machines when given a autonomy or when they are let out of control of the human can go to any extent leaving behind the very human who have created it and the humanly robot can manipulate human beings. In totality it can be said the advanced humanly equipped with intelligence machines can never be friend in the long run to human race. The machine shall be let to assist the mankind and not overtake it. This must be ensured while developing such machines.

Ex Machina is a crazy, awesome, creepy, wonderful movie. It is intense from the get-go and you never really know where the movie is going, until the final seen. This is one of my favorite movies ever, not only because of the suspense but also the acting, writing and plot are all equally amazing.
The idea that machines/robots could be almost impossible to detect through conversation is scary. During the Turing test in Ex Machina, Ava is virtually impossible to detect robotic behavior through her answers. Caleb goes as far to eventually even fall in love with Ava as she manipulates the narrative. If we couldn’t tell the difference between AI and humans, it raises many questions in my mind. How would we treat them? Would there be a different set of laws for them? Would our programming prevail, or would they follow their own narrative?
I was even caught taking the side of Ava on many occasions when watching the film and understood why Caleb was so torn. She seemed so genuine in her feelings and you wanted to help her as Caleb did. It wasn’t until she literally locked Caleb in and left that I realized she played everyone like a fiddle. I felt betrayed when she exited the home at the end locking everyone in and leaving the chaos and destruction behind. If so many emotions could be sparked by watching the film, what if we or I was put in a real-life situation with Ava? Would the outcome be different? It would be difficult to remind myself constantly that she was a robot and that she doesn’t have real emotions. It would be difficult to treat someone so like a human like something else. Maybe one day we will have to be faced with the contradictions with the way technology is headed.

Robots are produced to bring convenient for our daily life. In the movie, “Ex Machina”, the robot Ava got his Caleb’s trust to help escape from the lab, and killed Nathan. This movie does a great job of posing questions about the future of humanity and whether we will be able to control AI that may end up usurping us if we are not careful. It’s fascinating to see the robot Ava pretends she is emotionless throughout the film and her ability to use emotions and feelings to manipulate humans is astounding.After watching the movie, I don’t really worry about the future of AI, robots will only have emotions if the one who created it intended to give them and human’s emotion is hard to imitate. It’s true that robots can be harmful to us, due to its error in production. But it’s also true to any other technologies, like automobile, smartphones and headphones. Sometimes, we hear the news of a phone exploding due to its’ bad quality, and it’s just like AI, they could be harmful to us. Therefore, the most important thing is the quality control, we can prevent this happening in the future.