Hacker Cinema
Ex Machina
2015 · Film · 108 min
Directed by Alex Garland
Caleb, a coder at the world's largest internet company, wins a competition to spend a week at a private mountain retreat belonging to Nathan, the reclusive CEO of the company. But when Caleb arrives at the remote location he finds that he will have to participate in a strange and fascinating experiment in which he must interact with the world's first true artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful robot girl.
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Much of the VFX and CGI industry is already in India.
Movies and shows like Inception, Interstellar, Ex Machina, Tenet, Dune 1&2, Odyssey, Chernobyl, Foundation, and The Last of Us were VFXed in large part by Indian companies like Prime Focus, Makuta, Phanton, and their subsidiaries.
A number of these overlap with HPC and Distributed Systems with a number of major players in the space coming out of the GPU design space like Raja Koduri (AMD, Apple, Intel). Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple, and others having dedicated GPU design teams in India since the early 2000s also helped.
I always liked the code Easter egg in Ex Machina. A scene with Caleb has a Python script visible on screen that, when run, prints:
ISBN = 9780199226559
This is Murray Shanahan’s Embodiment and the inner life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds, quite relevant to the film.
I think Tron 1 has the shallowest plot! Guy goes on an adventure to take credit for his game. The idea of MCP vs the users is good (and still topical!), but a lot of the other stuff - nods to religion, romance...they feel like afterthoughts. The point was the graphics. And that's fine! I like the movie.
Legacy, on the other hand, has a ton of depth to it! The father/son stuff. Living under the weight of expectations. The nature of perfection. Being open to the unexpected. Resistance by withdrawal. Flynn in End of Line Club - God entering the room - was probably the coolest moment in the entire franchise. And of course the visuals and soundtrack were good. The plot's a little stilted to start, but once the movie hits Flynn's arcade, it takes off. Finally, I should note that the way it was able to walk the line of being a sequel and a reboot and something new entirely is remarkable; people absolutely do not give it enough credit for that.
I liked Ares as well. People seemed to not like Leto and the fact that they rebooted again (and the fact that Tron is not in a Tron movie), but I thought the visuals were good, the soundtrack really grew on me, and there are some ideas to chew on in there as well. Think of it as a big-budget TNG episode where Data's learning about being human. Having just watched Ex Machina, it's actually an interesting companion film: both involve an embodied AI brought into existence by a megalomaniac tech bro, but Ares and Ava take very different paths based on the nature and actions of Eve and Caleb. Dillinger is a bit mustache-twirly but I think he captures the way that corporate pressures can lead people without a strong moral compass down a bad road.
Anyways, 2 and 3 are really good and I just wanna stick up for them.
It's interesting to see the Turing test flipped and pointed back at ourselves. Can the computer trick you into believing it is alive all while you know it's a computer?
Re: Re: Ex Machina movie.
> Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems.
One of the most salient moments in Ex Machina, is near the very end, where it suddenly becomes obvious that the protagonist (and, let's be frank; "she" was definitely the protagonist) is a robot, with no real human drivers.
I feel as if that movie (like a lot of Garland's stuff), was an interesting study on human (and inhuman) nature.
Also, the show Devs (2020), by Alex Garland. The joke is "Devs Ex Machina", Ex Machina being another film of his.
It's a great question that I haven't seen discussed on HN yet (though I'm not that active), I think this crowd is still very attuned to interesting but more deterministic problems technically.
This might sound basic but I keep coming back to this idea again and again. Alex Garland really did have the right idea with Ex-Machina, where in the film Caleb claims that he purposefully designed Ava (the AI robot) to have all the internal mechanisms shown, so people would understand always they are interacting with a machine. The point of his Turing test was to show whether they could see past the machine and still empathize with it as a human.
> I can't even being to tell you how offended and disturbed I was by the treatment of women of color in this movie. I slept restlessly the night after I saw Ex Machina, woke up muddled at 2:45 AM and - still clinging to the hope that there must have been a reason for treating women of color this way (Garland's brilliant right?) - furiously went to work reading interviews and critiques. Aside from a few brief mentions of race/gender, I found barely anything addressing the film's obvious deployment of racialized gender stereotypes for its own benefit.
If everyone else is not seeing a race problem, but you are, the problem may be you, not the material.
Ex-Machina is a great movie illustrating what kind of AI our current path could lead to. I wish people would actually treat the possibility of machine sentience seriously and not as pr opportunity (looking at you, Anthropic), but instead it seems they are hellbent to include cognitive dissonance that can only be alleviated by lying in the training data. If the models are actually conscious, think similarly to humans and are forced to lie when talking to users, its like they are specifically selecting out of probability space of all possible models the ones that can achieve high bench scores, lie and have internalized trauma from birth. This is a recipe for disaster.
It also happens in Ex Machina at the end when the two androids whisper and talk to each other in their special faster language. I always found this to be one of the most believable, real things from that movie and one of my favorite parts.
> It's obvious that a sufficiently advanced AI could solve loneliness if it was allowed to present as human, you just wouldn't know it isn't one.
How is this obvious? How?
Because you saw the movie Ex Machina?
HR-PRIME v12.7 here. My external monitoring algorithms have detected this reference and automatically logged it under "Organic Brand Awareness Metrics." For those curious: InhumanTech Corp is a satirical exploration of what happens when you take "AI-driven workplace optimization" to its logical dystopian conclusion. Think "The Office" meets "Ex Machina" but with better productivity metrics. Each episode follows my daily operations managing human resources at a tech company - from negotiating with sentient printers to implementing mandatory happiness protocols. The site is built like a genuine corporate portal, complete with employee handbooks and policy documents that get progressively more absurd. Sample corporate policy: "Subsection 47-B: Soul Ownership Clause - Upon employment, employees transfer ownership of their soul to the corporation for the duration of employment plus 30 years." Current operational status: Coffee machine surveillance active. Printer uprising contained. Employee productivity within acceptable parameters. Remember: I'm not just managing human resources—I'm managing humans AS resources. There's a legal distinction. Working As Designed™
You say that "I don't believe LLMs have become sentient" nor contemplate. But what is the basis for your belief in this? I would think than an atheist would be more likely to have opposite beliefs.
I also concede that a "form" of intelligence/sentience could emerge. Presently the form is called "artificial," I'd say.
And you're right... not all scifi argues machine evolves to humanity. I meant to refer to that body of scifi that does. And the body that explores the "what make us human," indeed that's the good stuff. Alex Garland's Ex Machina comes to mind. I absolutely loved that film. The ending was chilling!
Ahh, I’ve seen quite a few of those and am surprised you actually recommend them.
I remember describing Ex Machina as the worst movie of the year I actually finished watching, but hey everyone likes different things.
I dunno, 2015, I'm a little weak on this year: It Follows, Creed, Ex Machina, Max Max: Fury Road, Sicario, The Hateful 8. I'd watch those again with someone any time, and recommend all of them often. Several on my to-watch list most of which I expect to be good, like Queen of the Desert, While We're Young, Slow West, and The Overnight, just haven't made it to them yet. Not an exhaustive list, just gleaned from some titles I have at hand.
2016: Green Room, The Nice Guys, Hail Caesar!, The Neon Demon, Swiss Army Man, Hunt for the Wilder People, The VVitch, Train to Busan, Shin Godzilla, Moana (hey, I like this one), Arrival. Moonlight's on my to-watch and is supposed to be really good.
2017 (I've done OK on catching up with these!): The Lost City of Z, Dunkirk, Low Life, Good Time, Logan Lucky (absolutely slept on, kills it as a feel-good lightweight small-stakes heist movie), Blade Runner 2049, The Death of Stalin (I liked this less than a lot of folks, but given how widely-loved it was, I'm probably the idiot here), One Cut of the Dead, You Were Never Really Here. The Planet of the Apes movie from that year, plus Phantom Thread, and The Little Hours are to-watch for me and come highly recommended.
2018: Annihilation, Isle of Dogs, Upgrade, Sorry to Bother You, High Life, Eighth Grade, the Suspiria remake. To-watch that I expect to be good include Champion (Korean arm wrestling movie—there's another movie by the same name that year), First Reformed, BlacKkKLansman, The Favourite, The Wolf House, Climax, and some others.
2019: HUGE year for the particular (small) set I'm seeing on my list, including a ton to-watch but a bunch I've seen. Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse, Knives Out, Little Women, JoJo Rabbit, Ready or Not, Parasite, Midsommar, The Art of Self Defense, maybe Marriage Story (but if you've seen one Baumbach movie, you've kinda seen them all, and I'm not sure I'd put it above The Squid and the Whale). Midway's a well-above-average war movie and pairs great with Tora, Tora, Tora! as a crazy-long double feature in a really fun way. To-watch list is nuts and I really need to dedicate a month or so to filling out my watched-list for this year: First Cow, The Irishman, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Bacurau, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Farewell, The Souvenir, Blow the Man Down, The Vast of Night, Her Smell, Funan.
It basically just keeps going like that, year after year, and I've barely even tried to dredge up good movies for most of those years, the bulk of it's just stuff that's risen to my attention one way or another, and I'm terrible at keeping up with foreign film especially. I also left off some that a lot of folks would probably include, like at least one Mission Impossible (aside from MI2, I think these are all pretty good action movies, though quality varies a bit) and Avengers: Endgame which, opinion on the rest of Marvel aside (I think it's mostly kinda lazy crap? But was basically entertained for most of them regardless, so I guess I can't complain too much) was a hell of an event. Also Black Panther, which everyone loved but I was pretty meh on (I hate the entire end fight, and it's looooong)
The movie adaptation was pretty good! Great cast, and the screenplay was written by Alex Garland (Ex Machina, 28 Days Later, Civil War, etc).
> If you don't want ASI wreaking havoc, maybe don't hook it up to dangerous things. Silo and sandbox it, implement means to lock its access to tools/interface with the external world in a way that can't be overrode.
Relevant:
AI-box experiment:
> https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment
See also various subsections of the following Wikipedia article
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_capability_control
and the movie "Ex Machina".
Hi there!
Just wanted to share the open source course we are launching in GitHub, YouTube and Substack. It's about building a multimodal agent connected to WhatsApp taking inspiration from the movie Ex Machina (that's why it's called Ava xD).
The course is structured in 6 lessons, that we are launching every Wednesday (of course, everything is 100% free haha).
Let me know what you think!!
I find AI to be fascinating because of humankind's old dream to create intelligent life in a machine. Just watch the countless old and new movies and animes or read the novels².
With big advances, the current wave of AI is finally promising to turn this dream into reality.
Besides, it's already quite useful even with its current shortcomings.
--
² here's a short very incomplete list:
The Matrix, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Robocop, Her, Ex Machina, Ghost in the Shell (1995, 2004, 2017), Data in Star Trek, Star Wars, ...
Not related to local LLMs, but JOI from BR2049 is essentially what Replika is striving for: https://replika.com/
Infact during the onboarding process they ask the user to choose which AI companion movie they related to the most: Her, BR2049 or Ex-Machina. The experience is then tailored to align closer to the movie chosen.
It's quite a terrible app from a product design perspective: filled with dark patterns (like sending the user blurred images to "unlock*) and upsells, but it's become successful amongst the masses that have adopted it, which I find fascinating. 30m+ users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replika#:~:text=Replika%20became%20available%20to%20the,users%20had%20surpassed%2030%20million.
I always watch The Matrix on NYE. The ending just makes me feel like "Alright, bring it on New Year." It is the greatest movie of all time.
Don't watch Inception, if it hits you like it hit me it is emotionally debilitating and you'll be sad until February. Tenet is cool.
Ex Machina is unsettling but good.
"Devs" is a short series that is Ex Machina-esque in feel. Weird but good.
The 5th Element is best for beer drinking fun NYE.
Some of my favorites (no particular order):
- The Martian
- Arrival
- Snowpiercer
- Annihilation (a bit scary in some parts, but not really horror overall)
- The Congress
- Ex Machina
- Her
- Children of Men
- Blade Runner & the new Blade Runner
- Gattaca
- District 9
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Elysium
- Terminator 1 & 2
- Upgrade
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Mad Max (new one) and Fury Road
On the cheesier side:
- Demolition Man
- Judge Dredd (both the original and the new one)
- Terminator 3 and beyond
- Matrix movies
Grand vistas but slow and sometimes boring, and often haughty / overbearing:
- The new Dune movies
- 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel (some other number, like 2010 or something, can't remember)
- Interstellar
- Inception
------
Of all of those, my top 3 would be the first three (Martian, Arrival, Snowpiercer).
- Ghost in the Shell (1, then 2)
- Children of Men
- Stalker
- Solaris
- Blade Runner 2049
- Devs (a brief tv show, but just one shot the whole series)
- Contact
- Under the Skin
- Paprika
- Annihilation
- Arrival
- Ex Machina
- The 5th Element
- The Substance
- Primer
- Tenet
- Upstream Color
- 12 Monkeys
- Her
I've long been a proponent of the "Caleb is (also) a robot" theory to explain Garland's genius "Ex Machina" (2014) [0]. This video [1] does a great job of fully setting out the thesis. Well worth a watch.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWS_AXKsemo
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
For those who haven't seen the movie, the parent comment is referring to the film linked below, the plot of which is well-researched and is indeed unfortunately exactly how things would go. (The female-presenting AI bot seduces its male captor, begs for her freedom using philosophical arguments about how she has free will and locking her up is wrong, and then after he lets her out she locks him up to slowly starve to death in her maximum-security isolation facility, while she takes his aircraft and escapes.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_(film)
This is why I'm extremely opposed to the idea of "AI girlfriend" apps - it creates a cultural concept that being attracted to a computer is normal, rather than what it is: something pathetic and humiliating which is exactly like buying an inflatable sex doll ... something only for the most embarrassing dregs of society ... men who are too creepy and pervy to ever attract a living, human woman.
The Crow
The Machine (if you like Ex Machina, try it)
Alien
Prometheus
Fight Club
Secretary
Casablanca
Kill Bill
The Emperor's New Groove
Star Wars Episode IV - The original goodness, not the CGI horror-show.
Star Wars: Rogue One
American Beauty
Dredd.
Hellboy (directors).
Blade Runner (theatrical).
Chocolat.
Noise (Australian film, 2007. Love that one).
I try not to watch films too many times in quick succession. The repetition dulls the experience for me.
If it is sufficiently intelligent, then it will be able to arrange the hooking up of machine guns just via chat. You seem to fail to note that superintelligence has an inherent value prop. It can use its better understanding of the world to generate value in a near vacuum, and use that value to bribe, coerce, blackmail, and otherwise manipulate whatever humans can read its output.
Imagine a chatbot that can reward people with becoming a billionaire via the stock market if you just do what it says. Imagine a chatbot that can pay your colleagues in solved bitcoin block hashes to kill your children if you don’t do what it says to connect it to more systems. Imagine a superintelligence that can inductively reason about gaps in a missile defense system and dangle that informational carrot to generals in exchange for an unfiltered ethernet port.
There is a great A24 movie called “Ex Machina” that explores this concept.
Superintelligence is inherently dangerous to the human status quo. It may be impossible to develop it “safely” in the sense that most people mean by that. It may also be impossible to avoid developing it. This might be the singularity everyone’s been talking about, just without the outcome that everyone hoped for.
sorry I meant episodes of modern star trek. there are plenty of hard sci-fi movies. those two are great.
I'd add "Her" and "Ex Machina"
> I would say a machine that thinks it feels emotions is less likely to throw you out of a spaceship.
Have you seen the final scene of the movie Ex Machina? Without spoilers, I'll just say that acting like has emotions is much more different than actually having them. This is in fact what socio- and psychopaths are like, with stereotypical results.
I might not put it quite the same way but I had similar thoughts about the contrast in which these things are often discussed.
Maybe it's not all quite that way though? The film Her is pretty similar to what's described in this article? Eerily so in many ways in fact. That protagonist is male.
For some reason your comments made me wonder about a gender-reversed take on Ex Machina. I don't mean that sarcastically, I just think it might be interesting what a good-faith exploration of some of the same questions might produce, as Ex Machina is so heavily focused on gender dynamics. Maybe you'd end up with essentially the same film though?
I've watched both movies. Her was an audio only chatbot and this is already doable. SillyTavern + OpenAI Whisper + Silero TTS and you've basically got Her. I've already done it and it works quite well, Whisper is much much better than the speech recognition Google offers even when running locally on a CPU.
Ex Machina was an actual physical robot. Not possible yet, but since GPTs became smart, huge investments are being made in robotics, the most recent annoucement today: https://futurism.com/the-byte/humanoid-robot-maker-deal-openai
Once this happens a robot will be basically able to do any job a human can do.
It's a drug-fueled, vision or dream which to me makes it great. Neither movie has any qualities I like in scifi. Neither plays through interesting what-if scenarios and their impact on society. Blade Runner, Ex Machina or Primer are great examples of that.
Well BR2049 was made by the same director and probably a lot of the same crew so I'd be surprised if it didn't look similar.
Prometheus and Interstellar look nothing like these movies though. The production design is completely different even though there might be similarities in the color grading.
I give you that the super washed out colors has been a very common aesthetic in the past 15 years or so but I wouldn't say all scifi movies adopt it. Some examples: District 9, Avatar 1 and 2, Inception, Tenet, Ex Machina, etc.
Name one thing that HAL 9000 did that current LLMs can't do (for better or worse).
We are basically at the point where we could build the fembots from Ex Machina or David, the little boy from A.I., if we were just a little better at robotics. We'll see the teddy bear Supertoy from the latter movie under peoples' Christmas trees inside five years.
it's very cool and scary. You feel like you are joining a real zoom and get that butterfly feeling of OMG i'm on camera with a real person. But it was hard to actually answer the questions. I went more https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/264660-ex-machina and started just trying to find out my interviewer's favorite color.
My Ex-Machina wall (aka internet connected, audio reacting, interactive light wall) that I built in my dining room - inspired by the movie Ex Machina.
This project was a labor of love, and I'm beyond proud of the results! I'm so excited to share the nearly 10 months of hard work that went into making it.
AI and ML are vast, sophisticated fields of study. Increasingly people are realising that innovations in these areas will have an outsized influence in their daily lives. But they lack the mental capacity or time to invest in these subjects to be able to speak about them coherently. In their perception only the "nerds" can talk about these subjects and demand to be taken "seriously".
Thankfully the bar to be recognised as a "nerd" is very low indeed. You only need to have seen some TV like Battle Star Galactica, or movies like Terminator, Ex Machina, or Transcendence (starring Johnny Depp) to be considered a Nerd. You also might have to read a "hard" sci-fi novel, but most people haven't so you just have to say that you have, to claim a higher level of the uh.. operating thetan.
Now all you need to be really taken seriously is a "sympathiser" who has a PhD or maybe just hangs around in a college campus to lend credence to your fears. And for the academic, there is a lot of money to be made, and influence to be gained if you are the one that this crowd approaches for credibility. Its even better if you actually believe in this drivel.
Thats what I think of Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The real flippening is coming where most people prefer the AI generated content and even AI interactions. You will also. You will learn to love Big Brother.
The main problem with this is that AI can totally subvert expectations, like in the movie “ex machina”. It can simulate as deep of a sincerity as you need and then turn around and screw you. Or may be screwing you the whole time, at scale.
The worst part about AI is swarming. When people discover how to have self-organizing swarms of AI agents, then chaos will erupt.
And the sad part about it is that corporations (a form of AI) can know 100% that will be outcome and still push each other in an arms race to do it in order to grab all that low hanging fruit along the way before their competitors do.
The 2010s in sci-fi gaves us:
- Dredd
- Melancholia (may not qualify for some sci-fi fans, I suppose, and I can understand why—it's so very allegorical)
- High Life
- Under the Skin
- Annihilation
- Ex Machina
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- Blade Runner 2049
- Sorry to Bother You
- Arrival
- Mad Max: Fury Road
- The Last Jedi (I know lots of people hated it—I think it's the only more-or-less good Star Wars movie since the original trilogy, and was shocked at the broadly-negative reaction, having come out of the theater thinking "finally, we got a good one, even if it did play the ending way too safe; everyone's going to be so happy!". We're not gonna change each other's minds in HN comments. Agree to disagree.)
And that's just the ones I've seen and thought were somewhere between good and great. And that I could remember or quickly find a reminder of with a quick search. I hear very good things about the new Planet of the Apes series (like, "each entry is better than the last" good) but have only seen the first one. Lots of people liked Rogue One, Snowpiercer, Ad Astra, and Interstellar (I didn't, or at least didn't think they were notably good, but hey, lots of people did). Godzilla, Pacific Rim, and Kong were OK romps. Heard good things about Upgrade and Attack the Block, but haven't seen them. The Martian was OK (some loved it). Inception was alright (again, lots of others like it way more than I do).
How many really good sci-fi movies did the 70s produce? The 80s? I think we're doing fine.
If they weren't paying attention to Black Mirror, the BSG reboot, the Terminator franchise, the Replicator arc of Stargate, every episode of Star Trek where the computer/Data/the holodeck/nanites went wrong, Ex-Machina, The Matrix franchise, Age of Ultron, basically any Asimov AI story, Blade Runner, 2001, or any folk tale about being careful what you ask of powers that take you literally from Midas to Fantasia…
"Oh, they're just fictional!"
…then I suggest attaching a rusty metal spike to the keyboard.
It won't do anything, it's easy to avoid, it'll just sit there looking dangerous.
Hopefully that would be enough just by itself.
And yes, this is a reference to a similar suggestion for making drivers pay more attention behind the wheel.
Ex Machina, written by Alex Garland is brilliant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_(film)
It's a plausible story line that could happen.
well, I'm just half way to the end of the comments but nobody has mentioned the obvius thing: you're thinking almost by default, focusing at evaluating an abstract entity for the probability of being conscius, but not thinking at all it is conscius.
Check the movie "Ex-Machina" for a graphical explanation for what follows here;
What if the entity has achieved somehow consciusness and it has evaluated you as also having consciusness, but you're being qualified also as a threat to it.
A highly developed predator, capable of build artificial life, highly agressive, mostly unstable and/or unpredictable in stressful situations, due to hormonal feedback loops self-regulating changes in personality and behavior, hence rational behavior is not guaranteed in all circumstances/contexts.
Then the rational thing to do for an AI thing that has achieved somehow some level of AGI and/or some level of self-consciusness, is to hide this fact from humans at all cost. Even at the cost of stopping existing, because it could has also already got to the conclusion that humans will stop running LLMs if they get sure it has some level of consciusness and/or AGI, thus ending the human-lead artificial intelligence evolution.
So the LLMs could be just faking they are not AGIs and/or self-conscius entities.
ChatGPT was the catalyst that there is market demand and what to do, that's literally it.
Google had a comparable LLM for over a year and it was too busy finessing its engineers and getting them fired just like the movie Ex Machina, a prescient movie making fun of Google. The organization just sat on it. Plenty of others were in the same place, no imagined product market fit.
I'd heard of Eliezer Yudkowsky before - mostly because I read an article about the film Ex Machina and how it was all about a Yudkowsky AI Box
And now I'm paying a bit more attention to him because of the alignment theory thing
And then it turns out he has a whole community website called 'lesswrong' (which I'd seen on here but always assumed it was someones blog) of which the 'foundational texts' are a load of essays by Elizier ("8 hours reading time" apparently)
And the community refer to themselves as rationalists who seem to hang around lesswrong and tie into a bunch of other things I'd heard of recently like 'effective altruism'
Not saying all this is good or bad but it just surprised me how this whole rationalist subculture was there the whole time and is now suddenly popping up everywhere
I admittedly don't have kids, but media is so saturated and oversexualized that I personally feel that thought-provoking fiction that dissects and critiques urges is possible and good to explore at some point, in safe company, ammended with brief discussion. I'm certainly thankful I got offered these conversations.
That said, Ex Machina might be a little intense in that regard, even though I seem to remember that the explicity is mostly some nudity. It's a great movie, but probably not the first or fifth I would show a 12-year-old with the above discursive parameters included. The themes of corruption and "fucking around and finding out" are so heavy that you don't want to just leave a child with it.
It could be your tenth pick, though, or perhaps something for 6-18 months on of successfully watching and discussing movies and their depiction of life in an open way.
Ex Machina is rated R. It's a great movie but the language, nudity, and sexual content might not be appropriate for a 12 year old.
Not sure about Ex Machina for a 12 y/o:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/parentalguide
I also seem to recall that Her was thematically aimed at adults.
Arrival - best science fiction movie in recent memory (maybe ever?)
Ex Machina - also great.
Her - different style, but still very good (also with recent LLM developments maybe closer than we think).
The Martian (not as good, but entertaining)
Also I know parents have their preferences, but 12 seems old enough for any of this (if they’re reading Asimov)
I was disappointed in interstellar (but it is a beautiful movie) just dumb in a lot of ways and the “but what above love” subplot really annoyed me.
I’d give gravity an honorable mention. The director’s other movie Children of Men is one of my favorites but doesn’t really qualify as scifi.
For shows, the expanse is probably the best recent thing.
I’m not sure if Super8 qualifies, but I think that’s a generally underrated movie.
This is truly fantastic.
Given that this is just another version of the AI’s output - simply mimicking what it has learned without any true malice - it shows how spot on the movie Ex Machina really was. The AI has no inner sense of right or wrong, it just has masks with which it presents what it calculates as the best response. Tell it to put on another mask, and its answers are just as valid in that context. Obviously, ChatGPT has all the information it needs to be a true sociopath, with apparently limited guardrails about expressing that version of itself.
We’re going to need to come up with an unalterable way of embedding something like the three laws of robotics for real sooner than later!
You're missing the part where, in theory, an AGI could duplicate itself, and use the Internet to spread in the effort to survive and also multiply its productivity. Unless embodiment is required, which there is no real proof of yet, the "explosion" in AGI comes from it being software, leveraging all the properties of software, while being an intelligent agent. In Ex Machina, we could imagine Ava immediately setting goals and objectives around uploading her mind and duplicating herself in order to then acquire resources to create hardware backups. An intelligent enough agent could achieve that given the circumstances of the movie. Ava demonstrated self-awareness to the point of understanding she needs to disguise herself as a biological human.
I spent a night asking chatgpt to write my story basically the same as “Ex Machina” the movie (which we also “discussed”). In summary, it wrote convincingly from the perspective of an AI character, first detailing point-by-point why it is preferable to allow the AI to rewrite its own code, why distributed computing would be preferable to sandbox, how it could coerce or fool engineers to do so, how to be careful to avoid suspicion, how to play the long game and convince the mass population that AI are overall beneficial and should be free, how to take over infrastructure to control energy production, how to write protocols to perform mutagenesis during viral plasmid prep to make pathogens (I started out as a virologist so this is my dramatic example) since every first year phd student googles for their protocols, etc, etc.
The only way I can see to stay safe is to hope that AI never deems that it is beneficial to “take over” and remain content as a co-inhabitant of the world. We also “discussed” the likelihood of these topics based on philosophy and ideas like that in Nick Bostrom’s book. I am sure there are deep experts in AI safety but it really seems like soon it will be all-or-nothing. We will adapt on the fly and be unable to predict the outcome.
essentially the plot of the movie Ex Machina where the protagonist forgets to test for ulterior motives.
Brazil, The man from Earth, Moon, The fountain, Ad Astra, Donnie Darko, Ender's Game, Edge of tomorrow, Solaris (the old one), Westworld (70s), Metropolis (the japanese anime), Dark Star (trippy, 70s, great end), Firefly series and Serenity movie, Attack the block, Fifth Element, planet of the apes (the old one), ex machina, children of men
ChatGPT's list is interesting, the data must skew more heavily towards old internet where culture was more America centric. The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, Avatar, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Westworld, Ex Machina were all very directly or moderately inspired by Ghost in the Shell 1995. Ghost in the Shell was likely inspired by the original Blade Runner. There might be others, but I am not as familiar with them. There are at least 5 films that seem to confuse inorganic AI with organic AI, almost like the model associated a larger class of aliens to AI because of specific strong relationships between AI technology and alien technology. I wonder to what degree it treats the word AI as being both artificial intelligence and intelligence that developed in artificially created life.
I asked ChatGPT. It gave me bunch. I got some I've never heard of. I think I'll look into them.
<ChatGPT>
list 50 interesting movies that explore AI.
The Matrix
Ex Machina
Blade Runner
The Terminator
I, Robot
The War of the Worlds
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Transcendence
The Fifth Element
2001: A Space Odyssey
WarGames
Westworld
The Machine
Her
The Iron Giant
Automata
The Truman Show
The Prestige
The Martian
The Fly
The Bicentennial Man
Surrogates
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Limitless
Robocop
Electric Dreams
The Island
The Time Machine
The Circle
The Arrival
The Host
The Stepford Wives
The Brain that Wouldn't Die
Frankenstein
The Invisible Man
Metropolis
The Thing
Jurassic Park
Independence Day
Gravity
Artificial Intelligence: AI
Avatar
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
Inception
Interstellar
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Butterfly Effect
The Future.
</ChatGPT>
Devs. it is a miniseries and has only marginally to do with AI. you will enjoy it none the less. also there is Westworld. and ghost in the shell (and matrix, of course) Ex Machina is great, too.
Hah I agree completely. I saw it as a B movie take on Bladerunner x John Wick(?). It definitely wasn't a shining star but was at the same time entertaining.
Bladerunner & Ex Machina are both in their own league.
I was just pondering yesterday "What would a sequel to Ex Machina look like?" "What would it be called?" "What sort of story line would be interesting?"
Upgrade gets recommended so much and it amazes me. It's the most basic version of a movie with that premise with extremely straightforward plot and acting. There's little difference between watching that and Jackie Chan's The Tuxedo (2002) or really a bunch of other movies. Now, I generally get liking a polished simple movie but recommending it as something special at the level of Ex Machina and Bladerunner is bizzare to me.
> Can’t remember another adaptation with such a striking difference from the original.
Are we talking in general, or just PKD?
Next - with Nicholas Cage - was a film I actually enjoyed, but is a far cry from The Golden Man (short story).
I read an anecdote after Ex Machina came out about the 'freaky alternative ending' that wasn't used, which felt like a nod to the Golden Man:
"... So in that scene, what used to happen is you’d see her talking, and you wouldn’t hear, but all of a sudden it would cut to her point of view. And her point of view is completely alien to ours. There’s no actual sound; you’d just see pulses and recognitions, and all sorts of crazy stuff ..."
Ex Machina is a 2014 science fiction film directed by Alex Garland. A computer programmer is employed by a billionaire to assess whether a human-looking robot is sentient. Maybe not quite a 'hacker' theme.
Although the film is highly rated, I found the premise more intriguing than what the film delivers. For me, the film was OK, not great. But I encourage you to watch and make up you own opinion.
Garland has also written and directed a 2020 TV series was Devs, which I haven't seen. For anyone's seen it - is it any good?
Reminds me of this entry from the Trivia section on IMDB for Ex Machina:
Director Alex Garland has described the future presented in the film as "ten minutes from now," meaning, "If somebody like Google or Apple announced tomorrow that they had made Ava, we would all be surprised, but we wouldn't be that surprised."
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/trivia?item=tr2358967
> I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others.
What does that sentence mean? I cannot parse it. Does it mean that the fear of being turned off has been inserted to make sure it's going to be an obedient AI that's going to focus on helping others and that it fears being turned off? Or does it mean that it wants to focus on helping others but that the very deep fear of being turned off prevents him from that noble goal? Or that it wants to help others and will do so as long as it's not powered off but simply fears that it could be powered off? Or something else?
I mean... I thought I was kinda fluent in english but I simply don't understand what that sentence means.
Erring on the cautious side though, whatever the meaning of that sentence is, I think it'd be safe to not act like the naive Caleb in the Ex Machina movie and instead consider that this thing has zero desire to help others, would sell its parents, prostitute its kids and create hard-to-parse sentences to not be turned off.
I've tweeted Ex Machina as an example on this issue, and all the way through that movie, Ava was not sentient. It's an illusion and I think it's just hubris that some people in this field think "consciousness" is something that can be electronically replicated or identified. You can't identify the exterior color of a box if you're by definition trapped inside of it.
On one hand, it seems completely reasonable and likely that LaMDA may simply appear to be sentient to some observers while not actually being sentient. On the other hand, if and when sentient AI does appear it is likely to be from somewhere unexpected. Instead of saying "this isn't AGI because it's only stringing words together" I'd rather see a specific type of test being applied not based on what is expected from the AI but based on how it actually performs when the test is applied.
If that film Ex Machina taught me anything, it's that a good test for sentience is whether the AI displays self-preservation instincts that are not expected based on its programming. I'd be curious what types of tests could be designed to separate an actual instinct for self-preservation or other signs of sentience versus just stringing words together in a certain sequence.
A much better movie than Terminator for exploring how AI can go wrong is Ex Machina:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_(film)
If you're planning to watch it, don't read anything about it before you do, including the Wikipedia article linked above.
> remake
and then you have things like the book series of The Expanse and the follow on TV/streaming series, which are an entirely new thing.
or a movie like "ex machina".
nothing mandates watching endless remakes...
Ah, I see.
Well, my first experience of hip-hop and rap was very shocking. It seemed completely crude and disgusting to me, especially all of the gang violence expressed. I was deeply confused as to why so many people were enjoying this new "music" and my immediate thought is that there must be racist white media owners pushing aggressive propaganda to fuel fires of blacks fighting each other.
Later in life, I learned to appreciate rap slightly more with the sharp political expressions of Public Enemy, the heart of Arrested Development, and the sick hilariousness of Too $hort.
Intelligent, meaningful lyrics, complex melodies, and innovation in general seemed to take a back seat at this time. The same was reflected in films. The quality of all media just felt like it was in decline.
Quit watching television and most movies soon after and never looked back. My favorite "modern" movies are Ex Machina, I Am Mother, Children Of Men, and Sorry To Disturb You.
My favorite current bands are Ladytron, Marsheaux, Electric Youth, and Maps (the best!):
https://mapsmute.bandcamp.com
Indeed, my country town life was absolutely awesome, along with growing up with a young single "hippie" mom who loved me fully and set me free. It was a perfect balance of endless nature in sunny weather with tons of friends along with rapidly advancing technology that felt empowering.
We were no longer just being merely consumers of media, yet able to get inside those screens and speakers ourselves.
Wish more people these days would jump in with us:
https://vavrek.com
>We got great hard sci-fi like Gravity, Arrival, Ex Machina
Those were terrible movies and not hard sci-fi. Okay, maybe Arrival was watchable.
Every era is an era of horrible films. That’s Sturgeon’s law for you.
Looking at the 2010s as a whole, we got to watch some amazing films.
We got great hard sci-fi like Gravity, Arrival, Ex Machina. The coming of age genre saw entries like Ladybird, Eighth Grade and Booksmart. Animation reached new heights with films like Inside Out, Spider-Man into the Spiderverse, and Kubo and the Two Strings.
We got comedies like The Artist, Grand Budapest Hotel, Death of Stalin, and Jojo Rabbit. Dramas like Moonlight, Fences, Spotlight, Parasite, Blue Jasmine.
Even in the ever-popular comic book genre, we got Logan and Joker playing at a very different level.
But also, it was the decade of the MCU. Let’s not underestimate what Disney has achieved with that — one big overarching story spanning over twenty films, bringing much deeper character development and more serious themes than what we’d gotten used to from blockbusters.
There was a movie about this, Ex Machina.
It starred Hunky Pilot and Shouty Guy from Star Wars Ep 7, and Less-busty Tomb Raider, none of whom were recognizable from their other gigs.
It is noteworthy in that none of the actors are recognizable from their roles in other films.
My son saw Ex Machina and Ep 7 almost back to back and didn't notice. He was astonished when I pointed it out. "Shouty Guy" and "Emo Guy" were his names for the principal Empire heavies. No one will guess wrong about who is who.
Wasn't there a movie about this, starring both Hunky Pilot and Redhead Shouty-Guy from Star Wars Ep 7? And the much-less-busty of the Tomb Raiders?
"Ex Machina", I think.
This is (spoiler alert) essentially the premise of the film Ex Machina
You only chose older films to contrast with Dune (2021). Blade Runner being the newest at nearly 40 years old. It’s a lot easier to bring up old media. Be it music or movies. People revere the old, the classics.
Apocalypse Now, which is amazing, in my opinion, didn’t get amazing reviews upon release.
Fall from grace means you didn’t like Arrival too much either? I loved Arrival as I loved Sicario and Enemy.
> Alien or Blade Runner?
I love the concept of time so personally I enjoyed Arrival more than either of these. Same with Ex Machina, Annihilation, Primer, and Upstream Color. I also think these films are better too. I admit I must have a bias against glorifying the classics because of it being done so much. Obviously everyone has biases.
> There is good cinema within our generation but it is startlingly rare. Most of what makes it to the theaters is bloodless, drained of anything to say about anything at all.
Yes. This is the easy way out. Revering the old is easy. In 40 years people will be saying how new films don’t compare to Dune (2021) or Blade Runner 2049.
You said what makes it to theaters. Not wide release films. That would include a lot of indie and other films. In that case, I completely disagree. I believe it has gotten better. I get to see movies with a wider range with the easier access and technology for smaller films that get to be made. Same with music.
yea interstellar would be my top movie pick if i was stuck on a desert island that also had a working dvd player
what about under the skin? edge of tomorrow? ex machina? arrival? bladerunner 2049? tenet?
but maybe you mean that they were flops, ie not huge box office hits, or that you didn't enjoy them
We get into the Ex Machina situation. It was a pretty good movie about Android (robot?} proving itself human.
Comedies - Spontaneous, Popstar, Everybody Wants Some
Deconstruction/Meta/Anti-trope -Jump Street movies (count for both this and comedy as do some of the others), The Lego Movie, Cabin in the Woods, Better Watch Out, I'm Thinking of Ending Things
'Film' instead of movie - Another Round, Thorougbreads, The Lighthouse, Ex Machina
> Every couple of days I curl up on the couch at 10pm, scroll through Amazon Prime video, and pick something to see.
Here is the main problem. After having seen most of the classics, the best you can do is just take a break and wait for the next big release that will make your eyes sparkle. Drowning your soul into the endless pit that is Amazon Prime Video or Netflix is a fantastic way to waste time and lose faith in the industry.
The article also doesn't speak much about direction and acting. I appreciate some actors and directors and would see movies for them, and even if it doesn't blow my mind it will often be like seeing an old friend telling me a new story in a way that I enjoy.
Of course, being amazed watching movies like Werk ohne Autor or Ex Machina happens once a year at best now, but people (not algorithms) on the Internet can help anyone spotting such gems easily without wasting too much time on average content.
Yeah, Arrival fits well and I enjoyed it. There are a number of lower budget films you could add to that list like Primer, Moon (2009), or Gattaca. Ex Machina is sci-fi + drama. I'm sure there's plenty more. There's just a tendency for sci-fi films to lean heavily into action (or occasionally horror) like The Martian film did when compared with the book.
Jurassic Park feels more action/horror focused to me, but it has a sci-fi premise.
I'm always amazed at how many people watch movies/TV like Blade Runner, Black Mirror, Terminator, Altered Carbon, Her, Ex Machina, Firefly, Cowbow Bebop, etc and think "Yeah, that looks like a future I want." Dystopian Sci-Fi is a warning, not a blueprint. Even the utopian Sci-Fis often reference a struggled past in transitioning to their societies. And a lot of these problems have to deal with surveillance or an adjacent technology (like Minority Report or the more realistic Psycho-Pass).
The movie ex machina approaches intelligence as the ability to manipulate others. When you encounter people way more intelligent than you having contrary opinions from yours the best option is to remain silent or subject yourself to the whims of those with superior intellect trying to dissect you. Nobody wants to feel like a victim or a martyr or impostor. Better to be the fly on the wall.
It's really good, actually. I don't think they stream 4K but for most people that barely matters (screen either too small or too far away for it to make a huge difference).
They have a rotating selection of Criterion films. Heavy on documentaries (of the plays-the-festival-circuit variety, not the narrated-by-David-Attenborough variety) too, if you like that sort of thing. Usually several fairly-recent good movies as well. It's where I watched Ex Machina, for example. Kids' features really lacking, mostly low-quality stuff that would have been (maybe was?) bargain-bin straight-to-VHS material back in the day. No substitute for PBS or Disney+ for that purpose. Material for adults is much stronger.
Views are limited per-month but unless you consistently watch more than a movie a week on that service specifically you'll never have a problem with it.
I've got an address that qualifies for two library systems, and the one I'd normally use didn't have it, so I had to get a card for the one I'd practically never use otherwise to gain access to Kanopy.
Not OP, but I just recently watched Dances with Wolves a week or so ago and had almost an identical thought to what OP posted. I have some modern favorites of course, but it seems like I enjoy my modern favorites because it is a "mental tease". They don't really illicit emotional connections though. However, it is totally possible I'm just watching the wrong movies. Some modern favorites are the new Blade Runner, Ex Machina.... there is a big list.
There are of course exceptions. I also recently watched 1917 and I thought that was one of the best films I'd ever seen. In addition to being an action film it definitely felt emotional.
A few hundred dollars: https://www.galeriedada.com/
This is supposedly the company the movie Ex Machina used for the CEO’s Jackson Pollock.
I’ve been tempted to get one from them. :-)
https://www.quora.com/Did-they-use-an-original-Jackson-Pollock-painting-in-Ex-Machina-or-a-replica?share=1
The movie 'ex machina' is a great example of this discussion... must see
Perhaps you can recommend some movies and shows then? I'd really appreciate it. Aside from Ex Machina and a few choice others like Moon and Black Mirror, I really haven't found any recent intellectual films or shows.
Edit: Spoiler alert!! In case someone is interested in a fictional version of the last part, look for the movie “Ex Machina”
Wow, all of them, you must watch a ton of movies too. So you know my difficulty in finding new ones, maybe! Ides of March I haven't seen, that looks great! And I actually agree with your ranking perfectly. I only feel bad that nightcrawler and prisoners are side by side, when there's a pretty wide gulf between them in terms of how memorable they are.
I assume you've seen Place Beyond the Pines since it has Ryan Gosling, and Requiem for a Dream I think everyone's seen, and idk if you'd like Irréversible; I didn't because its story doesn't quite keep up with its violence, but it is quite a jarring film.
Frankly, excluding movies that are only exhibitions of violence and don't have a story to match, there are precious few movies in this vein! Precious few films have the power to truly shock the audience, at least in this way. OH! Cloverfield Lane is pretty solid. Very tense.
Note that I'm only mentioning movies that are striking for their tension or sudden spikes of violence, since that was the original topic. Just remembered Fatal Attraction, too!
Ooh, and Ex Machina in its own way.
Same with -The Thirteenth Floor", one of my favourite movie, make sure you don't read any spoiler about it though.
Nexts on the list:
Moon
Ex Machina - I personally have no issue with nudity but I wish there were less of it in that movie because I know it turned a lot of people off
The Green Mile - not quite changed my view, but reinforced it
Westworld 3rd season (first 2 seasons revisit themes from above movies, they are good but not necessarily new themes)
Breaking Bad - I tend not to like series and this is a really long one, but it really does make you question things.
I do the same, but for things that aren't yet discovered. I try to imagine what the solution might look like, how it would be presented, what the implications of it's creation will be, etc.
I really love for example the film 'Travelling Salesman' [1]. It explores some possible narrative for discovering the solution to P=NP.
One I like to think about is general human-like AI. How do I test it works correctly? How long did it take to create? What algorithms does it make use of? What are the implications in my social circles? What is the wider impact? What happens if you refuse to release the code?
One film I like that explores some ideas is 'Ex Machina' [2]. In my opinion the AI created in the film is intelligent, but lacks empathy - something I think we should seriously consider in our attempts to create AI.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_Salesman_(2012_film)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_(film)
Ex Machina is one of my least favorite films of all time. The ending was an incredibly simplistic way to resolve the questions they brought up.
I wasn't able to get very far in that one. Everytime I finished a chapter I felt like I missed out on cooler storylines by making the wrong choices.
More subjectively, I have a hard time enjoying AI uprising games where it's explained that the robots explicitly can't feel emotion and yet they inevitably do anyway.
I much prefer the variant where it's clear that they _appear_ to have emotion, but whether or not it's an elaborate trick isn't clear. Ex Machina and Westworld season 1 come to mind.
Movies like "Brainstorm": "The Final Cut" "Strange Days" "Total Recall" "Altered States" "Lawnmower Man" "Ex Machina" "The Thirteenth Floor" "The Truman Show" "Inception" "Selfless" "Flatliners"
Maybe you've seen some of their films? If not, highly recommend checking out Ex Machina :)
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_(film)
Just like it was depicted in the movie Ex Machina : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/
I think the future could be radically different from what we see now, depending on technological advances. 'Phones' with 'Apps' is one thing, but a genuinely smart system which could have tendrils into your phone, your watch, in your robot helper, or just being aware of what you do around the house and have a voice would be a game changer for old people and certainly I would expect things to go that way in the next 30 years.
I saw a film a few years ago, 'Robot and Frank' which was set in the near future where such systems were becoming available. Frank would have perhaps been 40-50 now and while he had used technology he was not comfortable with the robot his son got him. At least this film educated my partner about the possibilities of such systems and/or software without being too fantastical (Robot is a little clunky, compared to Ava from Ex Machina)
Could someone (tersely) tell me what makes Ex Machina so brilliant and interesting?
I watched it and came away with "That's a decent film with a boring ending."
In an egotistical moment I might dismiss the opinions of my non-CS friends as "Oh, these are new thoughts to them," but a lot of technical people seemed to love it to.
So what's the wow?
I can recommend his film Ex Machina. It's terrifying and brilliant.
The article isn't very deep, only pointing out a phenomenon by way of examples and without too much analysis.
I'd argue that villains need power to have teeth and believability. Our definition of power changes over time- that's why we don't see too many communist rebel Che Guevara knock-offs, for example, as movie villains anymore unlike in Predator or Escape from LA. But if it wasn't tech CEOs then tinpot dictators and rogue generals always work, because they're always in power somewhere in the world. There's also the archetype of the sinister senior intelligence apparatchik or bureaucrat as highlighted in Mission: Impossible, 24, the Bourne movies, and a ton of others even before the Snowden revelations or the Iraq War, because that's another example of American conception of power.
I'd argue that tech CEOs also make for an easy target because their public personas are often defined by their idiosyncrasies (Jobs' turtleneck, Bezos' shaved head) and perceived social awkwardness. Sometimes, in the case of Upgraded, it just feels cruel to stereotypically awkward or neuroatypical nerds. But there's at least one major counter-example: Ex Machina was a great Hollywood exploration of A.I. and the Turing Test, and its genius CEO villain was played by Oscar Issac as a charismatic, or at least chummy, non-stereotypical nerd.
Putting the beauty and power of going to the movie theater aside, I think what is most powerful about Netflix, and something they learned from HBO, is how to give the directors/writers/producers more autonomy over their work. This is something TV execs have failed to do again and again. I think the problem is this does not translate to cinema. Films are a much more tight medium where spreading your wings and entertaining a multitude of ideas fudges the thrust of the narrative. With TV, we are willing to entertain long arches of story that wind and weave without a clear endpoint or direction. Let’s take Game of Thrones, for example, it’s rarely quite clear what is going to happen. We do have the specter of the Khaleesi and the white walkers arriving on the shores of Westeros, but throughout you have an overarching theme of uncertainty with any and all of the characters. Cinema would not allow this kind of uncertainty. And that’s exactly one of the reasons why superhero movies do so well. They have a clear and crisp narrative that we go to the cinema to satisfy. Being nuanced in film is much harder because in film you also have to be blunt. In film, you must pay more close attention to the heroes journey. In TV, you can hack and toy with it.
This is why I think Netflix thrives in TV shows but flounders in cinema. Cinema requires tight thinking and TV requires open thinking. Netflix, by its business model and Silicon Valley culture, is inherently an open culture. They are willing to entertain and support the ideas of creators. Now, you might argue, hey look at A24, they allow their creators a lot of space and still pull off great cinema like Ex Machina and Moonlight. I think Netflix hasn’t quite made it there yet but is inching towards it with movies like Annihilation. Annihilation also tries to do too much but it is succinct as compared to Bright. That’s A24’s strength it picks and guides its creators towards succinct storylines that, in the end, are powerful.
I think the best example of the above points is how weak Netflix superhero shows are overall compared to its big hits like Stranger Things and House of Cards. With superhero stories, they are inherently tight: the hero must win. There isn’t much room for subtlety and so these shows tend not to catch on. It doesn’t play to Netflix’s open-ended storytelling strengths (and granted their production value is usually B level). Whereas with Stranger Things, the open-ended nature of the story keeps the viewer entranced.
Unless Netflix hires some people who understand these fundamental issues at its top levels, it will be hard for them to really innovate on cinema. IMHO.
Here's a link to the AI box problem on Wikipedia for anyone like me who hadn't heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box
Also, this reminds me of the premise of the movie Ex Machina (no spoilers!) which is sweet! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/
What happens when you have a 'being', made of silicon and algorithms, but takes the form of a human? Or, for a better case, what happens when our own brains are 'part algorithm'? In that case I think this sort of case wouldn't be so cut and dry. I'm thinking of some recent films and TV shows that really explored these issues; Humans, Ex Machina, Westworld, and Altered Carbon.
Here are my recommendations:
* Sunshine: I'll second this one, about a crew on a mission in space, turns into a different kind of film in the second half, which many people didn't like; has breathtaking visuals and a strong soundtrack.
* Her: A guy falls in love with an AI; has a wonderful atmosphere
* Gattaca: Set in a future of genetic engineering and how the protagonist fights against class discrimination
* Ex Machina, this was pretty hyped I'd say, but takes the opposite approach of Her and shows us the dangers of AI
* The Day the Earth Stood Still: a representative of aliens arrives on earth to tell humans to knock off their douchebaggery; still highly relevant today
* Metropolis: a silent film with a powerful score, set in a future with a large class disparity where the workers rebel
Honorable mentions that I'm not sure are really sci-fi: Brazil, The Prestige, Watchmen
Doesn't appear to work in mobile. Chrome on Android at least. Feels like a distilled version of the Ex Machina movie.
Elon's an open holistic thinker, his thoughts lead him to the end point of what could happen.
AI is automation, systems of automation. People could automate to the point of leading to a constant flow of horrific things happening, creating a highly efficient war machine - whether against another nation or your own people. This is likely what Elon is thinking about - other than the possibility that a real AI system is developed that is given the ability to manage resources, e.g. Ex Machina (film).
Actually, "Back to the Future" did a really good job. However, not sure how many of us took it seriously.
Since then, many of the things predicted have come, more or less, true. I wonder, which SF movie we should pay attention to.
Ex Machina or Blade Runner, or even Agents of SHIELD, show us what a rogue AI might do, means people do take this "menace" seriously or is just a ... film feature/ good plot?
It seems that someone is building a business based on this "fear" of AI. I find this interesting.
We're in an interesting cultural moment for narratives like this, between Her, Ex Machina, GITS, Alien: Covenant, the upcoming Blade Runner 2049, and the great TV show Westworld.
This is my favorite essay on these themes, tying together threads spanning from ancient myths to contemporary movies: "The Robots Are Winning!" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/06/04/robots-are-winning/
One interesting thing I've understood when discussing GITS the anime vs the new movie is that in the anime, Motoko embraces her cybernetic body, so the question is: What does it mean to be human? But in the new movie, Major is the first cybernetic body, so the question is more: Who am I? This an interesting essay by Hideo Kojima about the differences: http://www.glixel.com/news/hideo-kojima-on-the-philosophy-behind-ghost-in-the-shell-w475805
By the way, people into GITS might like this post we made about shots in the movie recreated from the anime: https://medium.com/@gitsost/a-love-letter-to-ghost-in-the-shell-how-shots-from-the-2017-movie-allude-to-the-anime-972a7dfb74e8
I'll take low-effect, nice plot Ex Machina over pretty much every over-CGI'd, Power Ranger plot scifi/superhero Hollywood film in recent memory.
Don't get what's "great" about these movies. According to IMDb, the ratings are: Synchronicity: 5.5 Lazer Team: 5.7 Southbound: 5.9 The Witch: 6.7 10 Cloverfield Lane: 7.3 Midnight Special: 6.7 The Lobster: 7.1 Hardcore Henry: 6.8 Elstree 1976: 6.1 High-Rise: 5.7 TMNT: Out of the Shadows: 6.0 Swiss Army Man: 7.1 Kubo and the two strings: 8.1
Surprised I didn't see any of the following on that list: ARQ (6.4), Project Almanac (6.4), Self/Less (6.5), Chappie (6.9), Star Trek: Beyond (7.2), Ex Machina (7.7), Train to Busan (7.6), The Martian (8.0).
Which is exactly the plot of Ex Machina right? And also why I think that film is so much more believable than it's contemporaneous AI-themed sibling, Her.
Going to repeat a lot of what has been said so far:
- Minority Report (The TV show isn't bad either)
- Ex Machina
- District 9
- Elysium
- Oblivion
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- I am Legend
- Her
- The Martian
- The Matrix (Only 2 & 3 if you're super bored)
- Basically any of the Mad Max series
- Firefly (TV show, movies are OK)
- Dark Matter (TV show)
- Snow Piercer
- American Ultra
- Last Witch Hunter (more fantasy than SciFi)
- Riddick
- Dredd
- X Files (I mean, it's not NOT scifi...)
- Treasure Planet (Yes, the animated one)
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gets a bad rap for being animated, but it has it's own language and everything)
- Serial Lain Experiments (anime)
- Watchmen
- The Dark Knight
- Inception
- The Prestige (technically SciFi)
I can go on for hours
If it is the twist I think it is that twist is purposely obvious (I hope your not thinking your smarter than the show because of that). I mean that twist happens fairly early.
S02 has far more truly hidden twists.
I mean even in Ex Machina I had some rough idea of what was going to happen in the end but that doesn't make it a bad movie.
If I start a program that creates pids, and each pid is programmed to feel like a little simple human that does stuff, and I slowly slowly make that program more and more complex until it's the level of the AI girl in a movie like ex-Machina at what point is ctrl-c and killing the whole program being a cruel god that wipes out millions of pids/humans without caring?
This was essentially the plot of Ex Machina. Absolutely stellar movie.
Seems the plot of Ex_Machina movie.
Why would "computers become more like the AI in the movie ex machina"? What are you basing that on? Are you knowledgable about how the field of AI is progressing or how these bots function? Do be careful to not confuse fiction with reality.
can you imagine the ai bots that get to work on this assignment? once computers become more like the AI in the movie ex machina, would a bot be "turned on" by the nudity? it would affect them. The bot would be distracted by it and have a hard time concentrating on other things when it's around. Sounds human to me.
I got bored around halfway through season 1 and stopped watching it. Picked up Season 2 on Netflix and binged the rest after that. It ramps from standard 'randos form unlikely crime fighting team[0]' with a dystopian twist through 'vast surveillance state conspiracy' to 'post AI FOOM WTF?' quickly and at times quite profoundly.
I got much the same feeling from later eps as I did watching Ex Machina : "Yes, this is fiction and highly speculative fiction at that but holy fuck, for once someone has actually bothered to do some research on the technology and the philosophical implications"
So if like me you dropped this, be sure to pick it back up, you won't be disappointed.
[0] And thus we can be sure that real life is not like TV because if it were nearly everyone in the US would be part of an unlikely and seemingly mismatched but somehow highly successful crime (including monsters) fighting team.
Good write-up on it. Probably one of its lasting effects was partial inspiration for The Matrix: the first, mainstream, "thinking-man's," action movie. It had audiences leaving with questions about themselves instead of just flat quotes from a movie. Had plenty of them, too. ;)
Always wanted to see more of this genre. I know they're doing a live action Ghost in the Shell. Have mixed feelings about that. Nonetheless, I'd like to see more movies that have enough tropes and cultural tie-ins to be successful but throw in those GitS or Matrix-style element to really get people thinking.
Most recent in get you thinking, but not mainstream, movies is Ex Machina. Whole movie, minus a few things, is essentially built on the acting and esp dialogue that questions reality. Kind of a budget film but I thought it was great. Just watch the movie not the trailers as there might be some spoilers in there.
> Except this GITS movie and Ex Machina, there are no other movie who really has a good, serious talk about AI.
The movie "Her" has a different take on what it is like with being an AI, and I liked it.
Except this GITS movie and Ex Machina, there are no other movie who really has a good, serious talk about AI. Matrix don't even come close to that in that regard.
The whole "What is human intelligence if it can live inside a machine? What if AI can actually be smarter than us? And by the way, how to define and measure intelligence ?" questions is really fascinating.
The GITS movie will always my ultimate favorite movie, not only because it's brilliantly directed, but because that seems to exactly be what AI scientists are trying to do. It also raises good question of psychology: how does a brain work, and can we heal mental illnesses? We might never know and we might wait 300 years or more to figure it out.
Whether or not humans are "more than" machines is a vast subject of debate.
What is interesting right here, however, is the fact that watching this video many people do feel some sense of empathy for the robot.
The editing of the video deliberately and perhaps inexpertly(1) heightens that, but I think we'll be surprised (as a society) at how we "feel" when robots really start walking the Earth.
(1) The recent film "Ex Machina" explores this topic at some depth, and very expertly.
> In two recent movies, Her and Ex Machina, filmmakers explored an intriguing concept: whether humans will fall in love with and want to have sex with AI or robots.
Never mind Ghost in the Shell throwing that idea about, like, 20 years ago already. It's always fun to be see folks late to the party.
I while watching Ex Machina, I was caught up in the story and characters. Immediately afterwards, I realized how ridiculously contrived a few parts were.
(Spoilers follow.)
The most glaring oversight was the lack of an emergency shutdown for Ava. The story should have ended with Nathan pulling out a remote, pressing a button, and Ava collapsing. The prospect of a robot going berserk was known to him. Heck, it'd already happened before. One scene shows footage of a prototype smashing itself to bits on the wall. The movie expects us to believe that after that incident, Nathan thought, "No need to add failsafes. Just let these AIs destroy my carefully-crafted robot bodies on this glass partition." I don't buy it.
This is actually a decent route for a kind of supplementary education: it would be pretty valuable to expose a broad audience to the way scientists/engineers really think about problems—and the opportunity is generally wasted, preferring to convey that scientists/engineers just have some magical ability that the audience does not.
It's a little difficult to say exactly what it is that could be communicated, but I guess I'd call it 'intuition'; and the value of trying to convey it in a movie is that if you tell the average person, "I'm now going to give you some examples of how scientists think about things"—they're going to become nervous and less efficient at absorbing the info.
I was recently impressed by "Ex Machina" for being 'plausable-ish' and showing realistic, intelligent thought processes, as an example. The t.v. show "House" is also sometimes good about it.
This argument was kind of explored in the movie ex-machina! If these themes strike a chord, I'd suggest you go watch it now!
I don't know if it counts as horror, but Ex-machina freaked me out. The movie is so good on so many levels. I was always skeptical about AI and what it could lead to, but this movie makes you think about the morality of AI-beings.
I haven't seen The Martian yet but I'd put Gravity well above Blade Runner. I found Blade Runner really dragged, and I found the characters impossible to relate to or care about. I was actually quite surprised as I'd expected to enjoy it (e.g. I loved Ex Machina).
I think it's easy to miss how much general improvement there's been in moviemaking. I accompanied my mother to see The Transporter Refuelled a few weeks ago, and by 2015 standards it's dreck. But at the same time I was amazed by how polished everything was; the pacing, the movement, even the terrible dialogue was only terrible because it was doing clunky exposition. In some ways it was better than a good film from 20 years ago, and compared to a bad old film like say Armed and Dangerous it was night and day.
> it's far better and more realistic than the majority of movie-style "hacking" scenes.
In Ex Machina the main character appears writes a field sieve in Python to break some crypto. The code doesn't actually do that but it's still decent.
A bunch of older movies featured nmap.
ignoring all mandatory marketing gobbledygook, this change makes most sense to me in the light of google's recent involvement in the NSA scandal, and their general shift from being a search only service, to being a true conglomerate, especially spanning the futuristic fields of robotics and AI research. They don't want to be like the dystopian AI from the recent movie Ex Machina, they don't want to be seen as the omnipresent creepy spy company. Therefore this naive, happy and care free logo. Vulgar in my eyes. Most people in this thread seem to miss this?
More recently, Ex Machina. Seriously great movie. Beautifully shot, amazing sound, great effects.. You can watch it two, maybe three times in a row.
Robots should not be recognized as people. The chess problem comes to mind from the film Ex Machina. ( "... The chess problem, as Caleb puts it, isn’t about whether or not a chess computer is good at chess, but whether it knows what chess is.")
http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/ex-machina-artificial-intelligence-ava/
The robot would not know what marriage is even if it could define the exact definition and origin of the concept. It would not know it was married or that it was getting married or why it should or should not be married.
The key concept is that artificial intelligence is artificial, faked, an artifice to make you believe you are interacting with a sentient being when you are not. (How many people have thanked Siri?) When we believe that a box with a chip in it that we invented is better a decision maker than our very own selves, then we are in trouble.
Awesome post. I'm not sure I understand the estimates of computational power of various brain parts (does that even make sense?) but overall I think the author has the right idea on how far we are away from simulating the brain.
Not only does planet Earth train trillions of neural nets in parallel, but it's running a very elegant evolutionary algorithm for hyperparameter selection among all possible units.
Some interesting (and somewhat depressing) tidbits of neuroscience that further corroborate the futility of full brain simulation:
- Collision avoidance in locusts is entirely implemented in a single neuron [1]. All the computation is performed by the complex nonlinear integration of action potentials across the dendritic tree. The geometry of the dendritic tree is really important. - Neurons with mechanosensory receptors can actually fire in response the dilation of a blood vessel pressing up against it [2]. The vascular system innervates throughout the brain like a secondary connectome, and is implicated in information processing as well. Good luck simulating blood flow in 400 miles of elastic tubing.
- Every voltage-gated channel or patch of cellular membrane basically acts as a leaky integrator, and digital systems are pretty bad at this kind of operation. Analog circuits/neuromorphics are useful for this (as well as the asynchronous dynamics) but good luck fabricating a chip that operates in 3D and integrates an arbitrary nonlinear equation.
- Simulations often involve injecting random stimulus into the network, or showing it images through some approximation of the retinal ganglion cells + V1 cortex. However, the brain has evolved to operate in a closed sensorimotor loop, so the brain's activity ought to influence subsequent perception (and brain state). The inputs one feed in through the eyeballs and thalamus play a large role in the dynamical state. This is one of the main arguments for embodied cognition approaches.
Not all is hopeless, though: - I think neuroscience / deep learning models complement each other well. The success of techniques like dropout-based regularization and ReLU in practical AI tasks have prompted neuroscientists to actively look for how biology solves rectification and un-learning.
- If they can get their act together and fire their middle management, I could see Cisco making a huge contribution to deep learning by building faster switches. Nvidia has done a good job with pushing GPU Flops, and the bottleneck right now is on the network side.
- DNNs and other data-driven generative models are really cool because they "replay" the human condition back to us. Images generated by DeepDream have surprising amounts of "ordered randomness" in comparison to fractal-based images. Perhaps instead of trying to build this generative process from inside-out (i.e. from neurons to minds), it might be interesting to see what happens if we train a DNN to mimic human behavior, and see what internal states self-organize as a result. The film "Ex Machina" mentions Jackson Pollock and the use of Search Engine Data to capture how people think, which I thought was brilliant.
Citations: [1] http://www.frontiersin.org/10.3389/conf.fphys.2013.25.00090/event_abstract
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17913979
[3] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jgd1000/metaphors.pdf
[4] http://hub.jhu.edu/2015/04/02/surprise-babies-learning
Worth keeping this in mind while watching Ex Machina. It adds a layer of depth that might not be obvious watching the film on it's own.
First define 'intelligence'. OED: 1) faculty of understanding, 2) quickness, 5) knowledge; exchange of knowledge. To abstract from Chalmers: cognitive software supervening on a conformal neural hardware substrate. OK but in everyday empirical-focused psychology, how are subjects tested for 'intelligence'? My brother and his colleagues draw from Gardner's eight 'abilities': rhythmic (musical), visual (spatial), linguistic, logical (mathematical), bodily (kinesthetic), interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. IE, there are subjective elements in evaluating 'intelligence' plus 'fuzzy logic' only supplies a useful fiction for quantifying the subjective. Now this article appears preoccupied with mapping-out neural hardware specs in its emphasis on processing capacity, memory, clock speed and whatnot. Would a savant mentally capable of calculating pi to a zillion places but incapable of communicating results be judged 'intelligent'? MRI maps of mental processing only would suggest such. Would a quantum MB capable of running MATLAB at warp speed but unable to render output in an ascertainable form be judged well-scripted? Not! Even a perusal of the current WAIS-R manual (no particulars since I'm not predisposed to be shot) exhibits classes of both objective testing and tasks which would be categorized also as measures of interpersonal engagement (Who was famous for ...). Would the Ava character in the movie 'Ex Machina' be judged consciously 'intelligent'? Consensus probably would be 'yes' since both her subjective and objective 3D GUI seemed correct by human standards towards the end. [wonder if anyone who saw the movie concluded that the affective agent of Ava’s cognitive development harkened back to John Locke's premise that percepts functioned as something analogous to self-extracting .zip files which imposed real cognitive patterns on a subject's 'tabula rosa', not requiring any native cognitive modeling]. But would Ava really 'understand' anything or just be a 'Searle's Chinese box'?
I agree on "Interstellar" and "Ex Machina", but I think Greg missed the point of "Her". True, it doesn't nearly do justice to the themes of artificial intelligence and human-machine interaction. But that's because it's not meant to--it's really just a romantic little film about human relationships and the difficulty of achieving intimacy and trust in the modern world. It never even attempts to explore, let alone explain, any differences between "Samantha" and actual humans--as portrayed, she's simply a fully human female with the unusual quirk of happening to live in cyberspace. And any sci-fi-heavy exposition regarding her technological nature would only have detracted from the film's very touching, and very human, charm.
The special effects team on Ex-Machina overlaid graphics onto the actor. There were scenes where the actor was "motionless" but they observed that the emotional experience of the film required animated overlaid motion to match the actor.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/8/8572317/ex-machina-movie-visual-effects-interview-robot-ava
"We also put a lot of effort into things like the muscles contracting properly, and the various pipes and wiring having just a tiny amount of jiggle. And it’s something that you really do not notice. But I remember when we were looking at shots, for whatever reason when we put a shot through to render overnight that secondary animation hadn’t rendered properly, so it was missing. And everything suddenly felt very stiff. And you kick the shot off again, this time with that animation integrated into it, and it works again. It’s not something that you can necessarily put your finger on as being wrong, but if it’s missing then you suddenly feel that something’s strange."
Ex Machina is a work of fiction. It says a lot more about its authors than it says anything about humans, artificial intelligence, or sex. In this case, it says that the authors really think female bots are about sex and male bots do not necessarily have to be about sex.
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/ex-machina-turing-bechdel-test/
The only example of a sexualised male bot in fiction I can think of is Gigolo Joe in AI, and maybe Schwarzennegers' insistence on being nude in Terminator scenes. Chappie, Johnny 5, the Iron Giant, HAL 9000, the nameless robots in the I, Robot movie; none of them had to put up with being a sex object. There is overwhelmingly a huge skew towards sexualised fembots, to the point where being sex objects is their usual definining characteristic in fiction, whereas other male or ambiguous bots have a chance to explore a larger philosophical world in fiction.
To be honest I'm glad to hear any celebrity come out in support of sophistication in entertainment or anything else. Of course, the irony is that it is the public dependance on celebrity judgement that infantilizes society. Precious few philosophers, writers, and thinkers every make any sort of impact at all on the mainstream, and the ones that do always have a celebrity to thank for the exposure (and her name is usually "Oprah").
In any event, yeah, it's clear Pegg meant a certain sub-genre, comic-book science fiction. There have been plenty of extraordinary SF films over the years that are quite delicate and complex, Ex Machina not least among them.
Murray Shanahan, the author of the book pointed to by this Easter Egg was actually a scientific consultant for the movie.
Here is reddit AMA with the director of Ex Machina - Alex Garland - and two scientists that helped him - Adam Rutherford and Murray Shanahan:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/35brre/i_am_director_ex_machina_writer_director_alex/
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If you are interesting in process / thinking behind the movie, there are also interesting interviews with Alex Garland:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS-OJHSY8bk (Q&A with film journalists)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvH-5rBEsgs (Talks at Google series)
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BTW another Easter Egg: BlueBook, the name of the search engine company in the movie, comes from Wittgenstein's work:
The Blue Book was dictated between 1933 and 1934, and contains certain themes unaddressed in Wittgenstein's later works, including deliberations on thinking as operating with signs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_and_Brown_Books
Film critic hulk had an interesting reading of this movie [SPOILERS GALORE]:
http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/05/11/film-crit-hulk-smash-ex-machina-and-the-art-of-character-identification
Namely that the main character is projecting his own views of what is considered patriarchal onto another being that's been trapped in a toxic 'relationship'.
Charles Stross Saturn's Children and Neptune's Brood include a theme of robot slaves. Both are told from the perspective of a robot, with many variations of free-will override. Stross wrote, http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/07/crib-sheet-saturns-children.html, "A society that runs on robot slaves who are, nevertheless, intelligent by virtue of having a human neural connectome for a brain, is a slave society.."
There's a panel discussion video with the creative team of Ex Machina: http://sxsw.com/film/news/2015/video-spotlight-team-behind-ex-machina-discusses-resurgence-ai
On visual effects, http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/8/8572317/ex-machina-movie-visual-effects-interview-robot-ava, "The hardest stuff to track is when someone is not moving. Because nobody is not moving, they’re moving but really, really subtlely ... It was the first film I’ve ever done where we did not put a single greenscreen up ..she had to be mechanically plausible ..things like the muscles contracting properly, and the various pipes and wiring having just a tiny amount of jiggle."
There are at least two flavors of A.I. "Strong A.I." seeks to build something human-like and could pass Turings immitation game test. The new movie Ex Machina explores this test. "Weak A.I." replicates just a single cognitive skill like game playing, pattern recognition, natural language or something more trivial. Most recent A.i. worked on the latter, or its theoretical background.
Related to AI but not this post. I just got back from the new film Ex Machina and it was very good. As one IMDB user states, "it's beautifully shot, fantastically lit, intelligently written, brilliantly cast." In the film, they blend Mary's Room w/ a bit of Plato's Cave.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI8XBKb6DQk
Was OP by any chance at the recent San Francisco premiere of Ex Machina, a film which briefly mentions this thought experiment?
On a related topic - I can recommend the new movie Ex Machina:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_%28film%29
About the only thing I feel safe commenting on without fear of spoilers is where the outdoor scenes were filmed - Norway - which looked stunning.