Ex-Machina

Ex-Machina is a sci-fi movie produced in 2014 that revolves around the idea of human and robot interaction and whether we can produce humanoid robots that are identical to humans in every way. The main characters in the movie are Caleb, a programmer who works for a company run by Nathan who is interested in building humanoids and Ava, the most advanced humanoid that Nathan built. Caleb wins a company contest and gets invited to Nathan private retreat in a remote place where he can study Ava carefully. Nathan asks Caleb to interact with Ava daily to find out whether he could mistake her for a human being as she had already passed a simple Turing test but he still needs to know whether she has a conscious. Ava is built in the form of seductive female who has a regular human face. Caleb starts to interact with Ava daily and begins to feel as if she is a regular human being and he falls in love with her. Caleb starts to spend more time with Ava and she shuts off the power so that she and Caleb could talk without Nathan listening.She starts warning him about Nathan’s actual intentions and that he actually abuses robots and that his mission isn’t what it appears to be. Ava asks Caleb to hack into Nathan’s computer and let her out of her cell so Caleb gets Nathan drunk and does so. Ava escapes, kills Nathan and abandons Caleb on the island.

The movie addresses several points which we’ve discussed in class. Mainly using automata for deception and the whole idea of gendering robots for the same purpose. It turned out that Nathan specifically created Ava’s appearance to attract Caleb. He used Caleb’s porn history to construct Ava’s appearance based on his favorite porn star. This is what mainly attracted Caleb to Ava at first. Nathan could’ve used this to affect Caleb’s decision on judging Ava’s AI which is a sort of manipulation. It later turns out that Nathan already knew Ava’s capabilities and that she was already conscious and his actual aim was to find out whether she could trick and manipulate Caleb to help escape. She did so by making Caleb think she actually loved him which wasn’t true. We’ve read about the Robotic doll which tricked an Asian artist and seduced him just for its creator’s amusement. This seems to be the same case here after all that time, we still use automata for manipulation. We can also relate to Laodamia who fell in love with a wax statue resembling her dead husband. This is similar to Caleb falling in love with Ava who was not a human being. The fact that Ava killed Nathan is also worrying since it warns us about what our creations could do to us in the future.