In keeping with Hollywood’s plan to remind us that the Singularity is near, here’s the trailer for Ex Machina (2015): A film directed by Alex Garland, which seems to be a rare mix of Sci-Fi and erotic thriller. Sorayama anyone?
Caleb, a 24 year old 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.
It’s easy to see why movie studios are all jumping into the robot bandwagon (e.g. Automata, Chappie, etc) since the emergence of A.I. would suppose a tremendous change for mankind which is as promising as it is scary; scary because it’s surrounded by a mist of uncertainty –will the androids free us from our daily chores? will they enslave us instead? even worse, will they find us totally irrelevant?
Even though I’m still personally skeptical of the promulgated promises of Ray Kurzweil and his acolytes, what I do know is that a good rule of thumb to find out whether the Singularity is here or not, is when Hollywood starts to portray robots as nonchalantly as how computers and cell phones are shown in today’s films –ubiquitous and self-explanatory.
