This week’s Star Trek is very shocking to me. It is mainly about Data creates another android named Lal and he treated her as his daughter. And he teaches her every aspects in human life.  This actually surprise me because because it is really hard to create a robot that knows how to think and act like a human because it requires a lot of knowledge in computer science. I am a computer science major  and I know how difficult it is to code a very simple program. Coding a robot with definitely take tremendous amount of time and experience in order to do that since you want the robot to act as a human, you will need a lot of complicated codes in order to do so.  This frightens me because Lal is not created by humans, she is created by another robot. This means that Data is smarter than majority of his crew mates. I have watched a lot of movies and shows about how robots start to fight against human beings because they believe they are smarter and they don’t want to be controlled by humans. And currently, even though the robots/technology do not have their own conscious yet, they are slowly substituting with humans. There is a supermarket near my high school and the supermarket didn’t hire any cashier, they use technology instead. The technology has improved so much recently, and I am not saying it is a bad thing. Since technology also helps humans in many ways especially in medical field

This week’s Star Trek also makes me feel emotional too. Even though both Data and Lal are robots, they behave very similar like a regular human. Especially when Lal are starting to pick up those lessons. She learns that the world is not as good as what she thought, she got bullied by her classmates, the captain of another star ship tries to take her away from her father. All of those are things that humans will go through when they are growing up. At the end, Lal can finally feel emotion, but this takes her life as well. She is no longer there.  Even though I do not support creating a lot of robot because I am afraid they will take over the world, I do want Lal to stay alive since she just begins to feel like a human. However, this can foreshadows that a robot is a robot, no matter how smart they are, they are not going to be humans because humans have emotions- one of the strongest weapon that a human has, while robots don’t. Therefore, I think that is the reason why the director decides to let Lal died. The directors doesn’t want there is a robot who is similar to a human while it is not considering as a human. Therefore, I started to worry about Data, because from this episode, Data behaves exactly like a human. He wants to protect his child. He wants his child to learn. All of those characteristics are very similar to humans. As a result, I made a prediction that Data will not be alive at the end of the Star Trek. Hopefully that is not true, but this is my thought. Robot is  robot. Human is human.

Ex Machina was a film I would recommend to others interested in sci-fi. The movie was based around a programmer, Caleb Smith, who works for the company Blue Book. Blue Book is the world’s most popular search engine and the company held a contest for one worker to win a one week vacation to visit the CEO, Nathan’s, private estate. Caleb ends up being picked and gets to be a part of Nathan’s experiment. Nathan has built an artificial intelligence whom he named Ava and he now wants someone to judge whether Ava is conscious. Nathan first explains Caleb’s purpose as simply being a part of a Turing test, in which Caleb gets to have one on one sessions with Ava where he can analyze her. During these meetings, Ava confesses her feelings toward Caleb and manipulates him into having sympathy for her. Knowing if she fails the test, she will be shut down she influences Caleb’s perspective of Nathan making him out to be a liar.

Later on in the movie, we find out that Caleb was not randomly picked, but rather specifically chosen because of his personal background, being orphaned at a young age and currently single. Nathan chose Caleb knowing Ava had the ability to trick him into helping her escape making him believe they could fall in love. In the end, Ava ends up escaping by killing Nathan and locking Caleb in the laboratory. I believe these artificial intelligences should serve the purpose of solely helping the human race, without being a part of it. These AIs having human-like emotions can be dangerous, as shown in the movie. They are a machine and should be treated like one, we should never have the fear of one day being “taken over” by robots, maintaining their control and not the other way around.

Ex Machina was an awesome movie!! I loved the minimalistic effects of having a small cast so that you weren’t distracted so much and felt like you were immersed in the experience with Caleb. The setting played so well into the notion that Nathan truly was a mad scientist who distanced himself from all of civilization because of the gravity of what he was working on. I liked how the story was pieced into sessions each playing a pivotal role in the buildup of the film. I’m a big fan of science fiction but this one felt all too real when Nathan began to explain how he managed to design Ava so well. Pooling the entire world’s data through clear breaches of privacy was the only way Nathan could begin to properly mimic the behaviors and emotions of sentient beings. I felt as though the film was giving us a warning of what could very well be happening in our world today without us having the slightest awareness of it. The film focuses on AI and its uprise but I felt so captivated by the undertones of the film which pinpointed the truth of today’s society. Our behavior is being watched and modeled through all forms of electronic contact. We can’t know for sure when we’re being watched and privacy is a big gray area in our lives because of the internet. Nathans breach of privacy as a search engine creator and the utilization of all this raw data to be used to model human behavior ties so perfectly together. How else are you supposed to model the human mind if not by tracing its core reactions and mapping its seemingly infinite array of actions. The machine essentially learned enough about the world that it was able to adapt to its surroundings with one goal in mind. The fundamental behavioral link between all sentient beings. THE URGE TO SURVIVE! Ava given an ultimatum adapted to her environment and as Nathan so clearly told Caleb, she manipulated him into believing she liked him just so she could use him to escape. And then the thing that baffles me most but then I come to realize is of no surprise… she leaves Caleb behind and escapes on her own. Why does Ava do this? Does she have no remorse programmed into her? Can’t she feel? The answer is none of those things matter. All that matters to her is that she survives and for her to best ensure that she must leave all ties to her existence behind.

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.