Author: khurd

Fifty years ago, any kid with a comic book would tell you that robots taking over the world were right up there with invading aliens or evil mutants, but today robotics and artificial intelligence are corporeal, ubiquitous even. It seems like everything we know that makes our lives easier has a computer in it, science fiction coming down to earth like this offers unique and potentially generation defining artistic expressions, if you can produce something once thought to be fantastic in the light of truth and fact, you can alter peoples’ imaginations of what the future will look like, opening us to new ideas and possibilities, two movies that do this well are “WarGames” and ex machina. In 1983 WarGames released in theaters, at the time machine learning wasn’t new, the concept had been around for half a century by then, what was unprecedented was the idea of a rogue AI, a tactical defense system in charge of the entire U.S. military nuclear arsenal, I imagine that the first reactions to this film were fear, the fear that this may soon be reality, the fear that we would trust the planets security to a machine that may somehow foul up and kill us all, a fear burning hotter in the cold war era. I believe the director John Badham intended to scare the audience into a more independent mindset, encouraging self-reliance by showing the consequences of reduced responsibility, a reminder that pandoras box cannot be closed. Fast forward thirty-one years, ex machina is released, by this time the science fiction genre had beat the artificial intelligence subgenre to death (yet it was before the release of perhaps the most notable paper pertaining to modern AI “attention is all you need”). this movie didn’t focus on fear of looming destruction, the writers took a more psychological approach, emotional even, it brought the viewer to a place where their pre-conceived conditions for sentience were tested, directly alluding to the the famous “Turing test” whereby a machine would be tested and if the person performing the test found the AI to be indistinguishable from that of a person, the test would be passed. This was not the only notable experiment in the film, though philosophical and not so much a test, the thought experiment “Mary in the black and white room”, or if you’d prefer “Mary the Colour Scientist” was a significant plot point. The thought experiment is as follows: Mary is a scientist, her specialty is color, she knows every fact about color, wavelengths, psychological effects, everything, but she lives in a black and white room, and has never actually seen color, one day Mary is let out of this room to see color for the first time, and she finally knows something that facts can’t supplement, she learns what it feels like to see color. The film states that AI represents Mary trapped in the room, but after Mary leaves the room, that is human. This brings us to the parallel between the two films, more accurately the ethical dilemma between them. In one story the creator let the genie out of the box, and in the other they sought to keep Mary in the room, both decisions were met with consequences. With the rise of AI, we can assume that one day soon one of them will pass the Turing test, and on that day, humanity has a very grave choice to make, what to do with a sentient AI. We as people know it is wrong to hurt things that feel, and we know the consequences of opening pandoras box, but those seem to be the only two choices on the table, the world’s greatest double bind is coming faster than we know.