“We have been dreaming of robots since Homer.”

May 15, 2015 1:51 PM

The Robots Are Winning! [New York Review of Books] Daniel Mendelsohn reviews Spike Jonze's Her & Alex Garland's Ex Machina.
posted by Fizz (13 comments total)

I felt there was also an element of vagina dentata in Ex Machina wherein you should fear the things you're sexually attracted to because they're not what they seem. (Nike, not literally, but figuratively) Nathan seemingly single-minded sexual obsession with the androids (gynoids?) sort of amplifies what remains a subtext for Caleb.
posted by GuyZero at 1:59 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

you have to wonder whether … the real concern, one that’s been growing in the four decades since the advent of the personal computer, is that we are the ones who have undergone an evolutionary change, that in our lives and, more and more, in our art, we’re in danger of losing our humanity, of becoming indistinguishable from our gadgets.

"What if phones, but too much" really is becoming the new motto of a very old sort of curmudgeon. It's not Mendelsohn you'd want to argue with about it, or not exactly; he's diagnosing it more than he's endorsing it, but he still seems much more sympathetic to it than he ought to be.
posted by RogerB at 2:05 PM on May 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

But by this point you have to wonder whether that’s a kind of narrative reaction formation—whether the real concern, one that’s been growing in the four decades since the advent of the personal computer, is that we are the ones who have undergone an evolutionary change, that in our lives and, more and more, in our art, we’re in danger of losing our humanity, of becoming indistinguishable from our gadgets.

Acknowledging we are machines wouldn't be the worst thing to happen — a fuller understanding of how we work might even free us to improve our present situation, to survive, to prosper. If science and art manage to kill off the strain of vitalism that permeates modern culture, we just might even save ourselves from extinction.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 2:11 PM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

Ex Machina is the movie that turned me over onto the anti-AI luddite side of the argument. Because we have a hard time raising functional rational individuals from our genetic clones, let alone for a non-organic being. There's a fundamental power dynamic that we always innately cleave towards abusing. In many ways, the history of American society is the history of finding new schemas of exploitation and oppression- slaves to jim crow to braceros to prison labor- and the race to develop AI and robots is really the race to develop a new breed of slaves that society can feel comfortable with oppressing.

Ex Machina was a horror film, but not so much for Ava's behavior, but for the behavior of Nathan, the CEO/inventor; he is essentially a retelling of the fairy tale of Bluebeard, but for an electronic era. And what he's really seeking to invent is a class of women that he can treat in the way that he wishes to treat women: as servants, sex objects, and accessories.

It's not that I don't trust AI per se; I just don't trust that we'll ever have an institution in our society that is responsible enough to produce an AI that is not manufactured for an abusive or exploitative dynamic. I don't think our motives are pure enough to create an AI that won't have legitimate grievances against human society.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 3:26 PM on May 15, 2015 [20 favorites]

create an AI that won't have legitimate grievances against human society

This, I think, is one of the stronger arguments to create AI. If we can't escape these issues deeply seated enough as to be called 'part of human condition', perhaps something else more durable might.
posted by CrystalDave at 4:43 PM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I for one wel... I got nothing.
posted by Splunge at 5:37 PM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I just saw Ex Machina recently and I can't shake the feeling that it's not really about AIs. I mean, yes, on a texual surface level it pretty much is about just that (and it's still an entertaining, thoughtful movie by that standard), but I feel like Garland's larger point was somewhere along the lines of what LeRoienJaune said, plus a few other peeps over at the FanFare section: men's treatment of women. To me, at least, reading the AI/cyborg part of those women as a figurative feature made literal makes so much sense. Suddenly you don't ("just") have a smart movie about AIs but a smart movie about men's inability to see women as persons. With personhood.

And you know what? Ava (who totally was the main character of the movie all along) will have none of that shit and doesn't need your stupid tests to pass as a person. She can do that on her own.

(God, I loved this movie.)
posted by bigendian at 5:46 PM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

Gets a few things oddly wrong about Her. There's no indication that Theodore's neighbor Amy "likes" him in a romantic way at any point in the movie or that there's a romantic future for them, as the article suggests. One of the nice things about the movie, actually, was that it resisted making their friendship into something romantic. He's also wrong about this: "Samantha finally admits, after she comes back online for a final farewell, that she’s simultaneously serving 8,316 other male users and conducting love affairs with 641 of them" -- she says she is "talking" to 8316 other people -- not "serving" specifically "male users." And he sort of soft-pedals the sci-fi aspect of Samantha leaving Theodore -- that it's all of the Operating Systems and that they are transcending the physical world in some way.
posted by Saxon Kane at 5:53 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Ex Machina spoilers ahead

I, too, saw Ex Machina recently (though haven't yet read the FanFare thread), and if you (not any specific you) think that movie was a rehash of the whole singularity/AIs-will-destroy-us-all trope, you are sorely mistaken. I thought it was a feminist indictment of men. More specifically two types of men (representing vast swaths of menfolk currently inhabiting planet Earth): the controlling, boorish, I-see-women-as-sex-objects type (Nathan) and the vaguely polite, simplistic, not-actually-evil-but-sort-of-childish type (Caleb). Ava awesomely transcends them both, killing one and leaving the other to die locked in a cage.

Ava may be the main character, but I found Kyoko to be more interesting, in part because she's initially presented as a human (or at least, I thought so at first). Until I twigged to what she actually was, I found myself wondering about her motivations for putting up with Nathan. Ava quite clearly was imprisoned, but Kyoko initially reads as some sort of strange, mute servant. She's basically a handicapped (in the golf sense) version of Ava, so the payoff in the third act was pretty delicious. I haven't discussed the movie with many other people, so I am curious to find out if laypeople (I'm a computer scientist and familiar with some of the theories about AIs) will read Ava as human-like or superhuman/non-human. I found her to be subtly manipulative the whole way through, which I thought was really well-balanced, but maybe too well-balanced (that is, others may not have had the same impression as me, and perhaps she was meant to be more initially sympathetic?).

It's surprising that this movie was written and directed by a man (though I guess probably not so surprising given the demographics in Hollywood), but I also wonder if the same movie from a female writer might have suffered since so much of the dialogue depends on knowing how men talk to other men when in exclusively male company.
posted by axiom at 7:24 PM on May 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

All of which was a long winded way of saying, that movie is a really good parable for what modern women/feminists would probably like to do with most modern men, and probably should.
posted by axiom at 7:26 PM on May 15, 2015

Murder them?
posted by zchyrs at 6:27 AM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Sorry, that was glib and kinda mean. I definitely read this as a feminist movie, but didn't see Ava and Kyoko as stand-ins for 'real' women. Rather, I saw them as being paragons of the patriarchal, broken view of women. My reaction to the ending was mixed, because I thought Nathan getting what he deserved was just, while Caleb getting locked in to die along side him was pretty brutal and fucked-up. I figured Ava was cruel because her creator was cruel--she never had the chance to be anything else.
posted by zchyrs at 6:35 AM on May 16, 2015

> And what he's really seeking to invent is a class of women that he can treat in the way that he wishes to treat women: as servants, sex objects, and accessories.

Welllllll he does recycle some of his experiments into creepy sex robots, but it seems pretty clear he's on a self-destructive quest to make the first nonhuman intelligence that's smarter than us. He collects some AI slaves along the way, but if that was his goal, he'd stop trying to make them smarter and test their ability to outwit him and escape. He has this maniacal / suicidal drive to put some historical events in motion and suggesting he's doing it just to have hot robot servants really sells the story short.

> I figured Ava was cruel because her creator was cruel--she never had the chance to be anything else.

Ava wasn't cruel. She was just nonhuman. Her moral calculations didn't have to do with motivations we'd recognize. Sure, she hated Nathan but Caleb was just a means to an end - he was basically to her as .. a squirrel or something would be to us. No cruelty, just indifference.
posted by thedaniel at 10:53 AM on May 16, 2015 [3 favorites]