Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander star in Ex Machina, an unsettling and satisfyingly smart drama about artificial intelligence. Let’s just say: It’s no Chappie.
Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina
Universal Pictures International
How can you tell if a computer can think — not just pull from a programmed set of responses or rely on predictive algorithms, but actually make its own mental leaps and connections, and, perhaps, have a sense of self?
It's a thorny thing, to suss out intelligence, especially when you get into questions of what "intelligence" means, or the fact that we're still trying to understand how our own brains function. You might code an AI from scratch and literally crawl inside its workings, but there's no easy way to evaluate how well its man-made mind performs from within. Computer science pioneer Alan Turing, whose life was recently pummeled into a biopic-appropriate shape for the Oscar-nominated movie The Imitation Game, figured the best we could do is to go by external feedback. If an AI could pass for a person, with all of the obvious and ineffable cues by which we recognize and evaluate another human, then how could it not be seen as having a consciousness?
Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), the hero of novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland's cerebral, crystalline sci-fi directorial debut Ex Machina, is tasked with taking part in an unconventional Turing test. A programmer at BlueBook, an internet search giant that doesn't seem all that concerned with issues of good and evil, Caleb wins an employee raffle and is spirited away to a high-tech bunker on a remote but beautiful compound that's the home of his boss, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). Caleb's test subject is Ava (Alicia Vikander), and the catch is, there's no doubt she's a robot — a stunning one, delicately constructed out of transparent panels and glowing circuitry, crowned with an expressively pretty face. What Caleb has to figure out is if she's something more.
A24
