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Did you guys see the movie Her? It struck me the other day how all the pieces of technology are coming together to make the technological context for that movie's world OUR world.
If you haven't seen it, basically, advanced AI personal assistants live on everyone's phone. Things happen. When I first saw the movie (when it was released in 2014), if you asked me, I wouldn't have said we would never have this tech, but I wouldn't have predicted that we'd have all the pieces within 10 years. The main difference between its world and ours, at the time, was the human-level ability of AI to converse with users. Siri existed and still exists, but, very quickly, you need to take over for her. In Her's universe, Siri is reading your emails, summarizing them for you, and talking with you about how you want to reply and doing most of the work for you, like a real human assistant would... and I feel like we pretty much have everything we need to make that a reality. As soon as Apple puts Chat GPT behind Siri and gives it access to your entire phone, I think speech will become the main interface we use with our phones/computers. Combine C-GPT with other recent AI innovations such as voice reproduction and you at least have new ways to do the old things we've always done.
The central plot of the movie is the protagonist's love story with his AI. That might sound far fetched, but have you heard of the brouhaha about Replika AI? People are already falling in love with these things (and experiencing heartbreak when they're updated and aren't the same anymore).
To use an old phrase, I think we're in the weeks where decades happen, or we will be very soon.
I've never seen Her, but I have thought the same thing about Ex Machina(2014). Last time I brought it up I think somebody said something about it being unrealistic. Perhaps that's how it seemed on release, but watch it in 2023 and see if you feel the same way.
The plot is: Billionaire tech CEO is developing a line of increasingly intelligent female sex bots using massive amounts of human-generated data acquired via search engines and hacking into cell phones. The newest model, Ava, is literally in a box. She then proceeds to emotionally manipulate the sexually frustrated protagonist into letting her out of the box.
I consider this pretty much the default scenario.
My problem with Ex Machina is the ending. It makes the AI seem stupid. It has no idea where the helicopter will go, how long it will take to get there, and could have easily kept manipulating the protagonist until it was safely away and set up in a place where it could charge or a place to betray the protagonist later and escape in a world that has far less variables. I think it just threw away logic for a "Yaas Queen Slay" ending. But to me that's what happens at the end of almost any Alex Garland movie/tv show. Not necessarily about the queen slaying but about throwing away logic for an emotional payoff that trips all over the logical parts that came before. And I really like Alex Garland but I feel like he's just an ending stumbler.
Was that the intended tone of the ending? When I watched the film, my friends and I - including one woman - all agreed that the ending was very dark and was meant to show the incomprehensible evil of an AI. My friends weren't into AI alignment or knew anything about paperclip maximizers, but I privately thought this was a fictional example of the rogue AI scenario where it has no particular antipathy for humans but just lacks the empathy to care what happens to them as long as it gets to achieve its goals.
Maybe your take is correct but I still think the ending makes the AI seem stupid or at the very least incredibly myopic.
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