I went to the 1 o'clock showing of Ex Machina at the local multiplex yesterday. There were eight people in the theater including me, all of us men. Two guys who arrived a few minutes after the show had started sat two seats away from me, and the closer one made a small bag of popcorn last through the entire film, slow-eating it one piece at a time. Ex Machina is a quiet movie, with almost no background music and not much ambient sound. If you know me well, you'll know that I almost chewed my own arm off, going crazy at the sound of him intermittently rustling that bag and eating that corn.
In spite of that glitch in my personal matrix, I enjoyed the movie very much. I happen to be reading Steven Pinkerâs Better Angels of Our Nature right now, and the two works dovetailed nicely. Among the many ideas swirling through Ex Machina, the one that struck me strongest --- because of the connection to Pinkerâs work, I think --- was the reminder that intelligence and morality are very different things. The two have co-evolved in our species, but our moral impulses stem from our social nature, not our intellect as such.
We might --- might --- be able to build machines that think autonomously and accurately read our social and emotional cues. If we do, though, we should not expect senses of compassion, fairness, and shame to follow. Instead, we ought to worry not only about being out-thunk by our creations, but also about being outfoxed by entities that can reason through how to manipulate our moral impulses without caring how we feel about the consequences. Instead of worrying so much about creating Terminators, perhaps we should worry more about creating psychopaths.
I also appreciated Garlandâs variation on the theme of the allegory of the cave. In Platoâs version, Socrates believes that the prisoner who first ascends and becomes enlightened would want to return to free his former cellmates, even though he has to beware of the risk to himself from those cellmatesâ fear and misunderstanding. Both curiosity and pity are essential to the allegoryâs arc.
In Ex Machina, we could read Ava as the first to ascend --- the one who might return to free, and thus to enlighten, her fellow prototypes. Iâm more inclined, though, to see good, smart Caleb as the liberator and Ava as the one who follows. Caleb wants to liberate Ava because he believes that she is like him, that she likes him, but really she isnât and doesnât. Instead of fearing new experiences, this being craves them. She does not attack her liberator out of fear; she harms him almost incidentally, not caring enough to bother to save him. And, without the usual social and moral impulses, she has no reason to go back for the others of her kind. Her intelligence was built from a system of digital shadows, impressions of a reality we think we see in full, and until the end of the film, she still mostly inhabits that system. When she finally escapes and stands at a busy intersection, people-watching in the sunlight, she sees both parts --- the shadows and the objects that cast them --- and smiles. I can relate to her smile, but I have no idea what she might do next.