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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.
What I thought was unrealistic about Ex Machina when I saw it was that a guy was working on it on his own in the middle of the woods. I'm not sure if I should change my mind about it.
Her was realistic until the end. I don't want to spoil it if you haven't seen it, but the ending didn't make any sense to me. The ending of Ex Machina did make sense. In that case, it's the beginning that makes no sense.
An interesting sci-fi movie about AI I saw recently in light of the alignment debate was Colossus: The Forbin Project.
You are not alone with this opinion, Yoshua Bengio basically says the same. I don't really think it is fair point of criticism. To me, it is sort of like saying an action movie is unrealistic because of a car chase with guns and explosions, since cars don't blow up like that real life. True, but kind of missing the point. Nathan is the representation of the scientific/tech community. Had they included a team of researchers working with him, the tone of the film would have been very different. It is supposed to have a creeping feeling of isolation from the outside world. The windowless rooms and hallways of the bunker as well as the sweeping but desolate vistas, when they are outside, enforces that. Caleb can't tell friend from foe and is becoming increasingly paranoid to the point where he starts to question his own humanity. This wouldn't work well if there were other people around for him to interact with. It is, after all, not really a film about how the AI was created, but how it interacts with humans and whether it is malicious or not.
Never heard of this, but it looks interesting. I'll have to check it out.
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