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Ex Machina

#1
Yazata Offline
Ex Machina is a new science-fiction movie that I think that I'd like to see.

It begins with the protagonist, a young Silicon Valley guy who works for the world's most successful search-engine company. (The movie was obviously channeling Google there.) He wins a company contest, and only then discovers what the prize is - a week with the company's iconic and legendary multi-billionaire CEO at the latter's huge compound in the wilds of Alaska. Our hero arrives by helicopter and meets the CEO, a Steve Jobs-ish mixture of intelligence and crazy visionary intensity. He's complete with Jobs' shaven head but with a crazy luxuriant beard. (All the better to play God.) Scary.

The CEO's compund is a super high-tech research facility ('there's enough fiber optic cable in here to lasso the Moon') and it soon develops that the CEO has been working on his next big idea - artificial intelligence.

In particular, a robot named Ava (Eve), the sexiest robot you will ever see. Like Apple products are imagined to be, she's a marvel of stylish industrial design. She (and yes, she's very much a 'she') is a strange mixture of superhuman penetration and childlike naivete. She looks a little like the robots in the movie I Robot, except with a real actress' face computer-superimposed on the front of her transparent head. The robot body apparently moves in human fashion by motion-capture.

The reason our protagonist is there is to conduct kind of a Turing-test on Ava. It isn't that she is pretending to be human, she can't physically do that. The issue being probed is more along the lines of the philosophy of mind's 'zombie' speculations. The CEO wants an unbiased observer to try to discover whether Ava really experiences feelings, or whether she is just simulating them.

The reviewers don't say how the movie ends, but I think that it's safe to say that Ava passes the zombie smell-test.

A philosophical-psychological acting-intense drama featuring the exploration of the inner life of an AI and what it means to be sentient. I like the idea of that.
#3
Yazata Offline
The way that the trailer has our protagonist discovering that some of the other humans in the CEO's compound are robots, and the way he is shown is looking in his own mouth along with the mechanical way that he punches at a glass wall, suggests that our CEO's test might be a lot more radical that it first appears.

Was our hero murdered and replaced with a machine, with all of the hero's memories downloaded into it? Is the CEO's real test whether or not he subjectively notices any difference?

Is the CEO really trying to invent immortality? 'Deus ex machina' literally means 'God out of a machine'.

Apparently part of the tension in this movie is not knowing who is flesh-and-blood and who is a simulacrum. Along with the ambiguity of not really being sure what difference it makes...

Gotta go see the movie I guess, to find out.
#4
cluelusshusbund Offline
It will prolly be about 3 mounths befor my Liberry gets it... I just saw "Lucy" an "The Interview" a couple of days ago.!!!

Hard to predict whos what or who... sinse a good story coud go in any direction... an i have a feelin this is gonna be a good story.!!!




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