Hi Steemians! I wasn’t much active here past month because I didn’t have much free time, but now I’m about to change that. I was thinking for a long time to write a detailed series of articles about artificial intelligence and meanwhile, I came up to this great movie with the same theme and thought that this can be good intro to my series! If you are interested in the field of AI or you are just a Sci-fi fan, you’ll definitely enjoy watching it.
This is directorial debut by an English novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland. He got an idea about this move when he was a kid, after experiments about basic programming on the parent’s computer. Trying to find answers can machines act like human, he read numerous books and watched many films with that topic, and years later – this film was born.
I like the thing that there are just a few actors, so the good scenario can come up to be noticed. The story is about young programmer Caleb, who just won the prize and got the chance to meet genius CEO of his company – Nathan. After meeting with Nathan, we see that he is trying to make an AI which will act exactly like human and Caleb is here to help him about the Turing test. There are a lot of symbols and references in this movie, like the Nathan’s company name Blue Book which can be clear reference to Facebook. Interesting thing is that Nathan in one scene is talking about hacking all the mobile phones on the planet because he needed data to train his AI and all mobile tech companies knew that but couldn’t do anything, because they are also collecting data unlawful, and two years later we really have the world class scandal between Facebook and Google Analytics about users data!
This movie opens many philosophical and ethical questions like where is the line which we shouldn’t cross in AI field and where is the place of AI in our future lives? It plays well with peoples fear about Matrix or Terminator scenario, offering us time to think about it. It’s the game of illusions and manipulations in which essence is just will to survive, and like movie poster says there’s nothing more human than that will – it is that ultimate Turing test.
Watching conversations between Caleb and Ava (name of AI), we can also see that no matter how smart and intellectual you are, it all falls down when it comes to basic human instincts like sexuality. It left us thinking is it just ability of thinking that makes us humans or there is much more?
There’s a lot of movies with this theme and this one actually doesn’t offer us nothing new, but it show us that same thing on the brand new, fresh way and it came up right at the time when we actually can’t see good sci-fi project filmed and also at the time when whole world is digitalizing so this can be interesting to everyone because it portrays our not-so-distant future.
Hope you’ll watch it and enjoyed it and I would like to hear your impressions, because this topic is interesting for many discussions.
You can consider this movie as a small intro to my next text, so stay tuned! :)
Thank you for your time,
Nikola