Ex Machina (2014)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign S welcome back to the final girl on 6th Avenue podcast. My My name is Carolyn Smith Hillmer. [00:00:27] Speaker B: And I am 6th Avenue's very own final Girl and today I am here to talk to you about the hauntingly relevant film Ex Machina, written and directed by Alex Garland, came out in 2014 with a runtime of 108 minutes and the Academy Award for Best Visual effects. Our Bible, IMDb showcases the following description A young programmer is selected to participate in a groundbreaking experiment in synthetic intelligence by evaluating the human qualities of a highly advanced humanoid AI. And if you haven't figured it out yet, you are listening to an AI generated clone of my very own voice. Yes, this podcast episode will feature a clone of my actual voice. I thought it was both cool as fuck and relevant to the topic at hand, given the film we are discussing today. [00:01:31] Speaker A: This is a bit of a science. [00:01:33] Speaker B: Experiment for myself, so stick with me today while we try this together. Now let's get on to the film. Our film opens with the title screen because Alex Garland is no coward and we are then immediately introduced to Caleb, our main man. And Caleb is a programmer for a search engine company and he is currently at work. He gets great news which is that he has won a one week visit to the remote and luxurious home of CEO Nathan Bateman. Caleb gets flown in via helicopter and has to traverse some nature, more nature than I would be comfortable traversing in order to get to the front gate of Nathan's home. Upon arrival he is greeted by an automated voice that immediately calls him by name. He is instructed to go to the camera near the front door to have his photo taken and a key card gets printed for him. At this point he is allowed to enter the home. The one thing about this home that you need to know is that it is the home I have imagined myself having in a mountainous location on almost my entire life. Lots of floor to ceiling windows, exposed rock, futuristic but still not quite postmodern. Caleb walks around the giant house before he finds Nathan outside boxing with a punching bag. He greets Caleb and they go into the kitchen where Nathan explains that he had planned to have breakfast with Caleb but but he is unfortunately experiencing the mother of all hangovers and isn't planning on eating breakfast at all. They both agree that they are going to be totally normal and not weird or in awe of Nathan or anything like that. They are just going to be two guys hanging out. Nathan takes Caleb to his room while explaining that the key card he received at the front door is basically his key to all things in the home that he can access if he presents it to a room he does not have. [00:03:50] Speaker A: There is a good reason there are no windows in the bedroom. Caleb and Nathan review an NDA together where Caleb says that he feels like he needs a lawyer because none of the language is standard, albeit slightly reluctantly, Caleb signs it anyway. Nathan asks Caleb if he knows what the Turing Test is. For those of you that do not know, the Turing Test was coined in 1949 by Alexander Turing. The the test is relatively simple. A human is given a natural conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator is to determine which party is the machine and which party is the human. If the evaluator cannot identify or distinguish reliably which party is the machine, then the machine passes the test. Kind of scary, right? Caleb lights up when he hears that this test is being referenced. He asks Nathan if we are talking about artificial intelligence. Nathan says he has already created what he believes to be AI, but that Caleb will be the human evaluator referenced the experiment. He is at what will be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time. He tells Nathan that if he has created a conscious machine, that that is the history of gods, not of man. Moving now to session one with Ava in a private room where Nathan can watch via a live video and audio feed. Caleb is to be introduced to Ava, our reportedly conscious machine. Caleb notices that there is a layer of glass between himself and Ava which has evidence of someone trying to break through the glass layer. He watches Ava move about her room. Caleb and Ava introduce themselves to one another. Ava explains that she has never met anyone new before. Only Nathan. Caleb prompts Ava to explain the term breaking the ice, which she does perfectly. Ava tells Caleb that she is one. Not one year or one day, just one. She tells him she has always been able to speak. She asks if he will come back tomorrow and Caleb agrees to do so. There is a good reason there are no windows in the bedroom. Caleb and Nathan review an NDA together where Caleb says that he feels like he needs a lawyer because none of the language is standard, albeit slightly reluctantly, Caleb signs it anyway. Nathan asks Caleb if he knows what the Turing Test is. For those of you that do not know, the Turing Test was coined in 1949 by Alexander Turing. The test is relatively simple. A human is given a natural conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator is to determine which party is the machine and which party is the human. If the evaluator cannot identify or distinguish reliably which party is the machine, then the machine passes the test. Kind of scary, right? Caleb lights up when he hears that this test is being referenced. He asks Nathan if we are talking about artificial intelligence. Nathan says he has already created what he believes to be AI but that Caleb will be the human evaluator referenced in the experiment. He is at what will be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time. He tells Nathan that if he has created a conscious machine, that that is the history of gods, not of man. Moving now to session one with Ava in a private room where Nathan can watch via a live video and audio feedback. Caleb is to be introduced to Ava, our reportedly conscious machine. Caleb notices that there is a layer of glass between himself and Ava which has evidence of someone trying to break through the glass layer. He watches Ava move about her room. Caleb and Ava introduce themselves to one another. Ava explains that she has never met anyone new before. Only Nathan. Caleb prompts Ava to explain the term breaking the ice, which she does perfectly. Ava tells Caleb that she is one. Not one year or one day, just one. She tells him she has always been able to speak. She asks if he will come back tomorrow, and Caleb agrees to do so. Over some beers, Caleb tells Nathan that he is fascinated by Ava. Nathan is obsessed with the fact that Caleb has referred to him as a God. Caleb says that he is troubled by one thing, and that is that in the Turing Test, the machine is hidden from the examiner. Nathan says that we are way past that and that if he had only had Caleb listen to Ava's voice, she would certainly pass for human. He is essentially trying to have herself prove to Caleb that she is a robot. And Caleb can then evaluate whether or not he feels that she still has consciousness. Nathan does not want to answer any technical questions. He only wants Caleb to explain how he feels about Ava, to which Caleb says that she is fucking amazing. That night, Caleb cannot sleep. He wakes up and turns on the TV to find no television channels or shows. It is just different live feeds of surveillance cameras from around the property, including Ava's room. He watches her for a moment and she turns to the camera to look. At the same time, the power goes out and a backup generator is utilized. During this time, the entire facility is on lockdown and Caleb cannot leave his room. And after power is restored, Caleb begins to walk around the house. He tries to use the phone and the house prompts him for his key card. Nathan is sitting in the dark behind him and scares the shit out of Caleb. When he loudly tells him that he does not have access to use the phone. Because he is sort of an unknown person. Nathan tells Caleb that the power cuts have been happening recently, but that he is working on it. He also says that the doors being locked during these outages is a security measure. Otherwise if someone wanted to break in, they could cut the power and to the house and come inside to steal whatever they wanted. Caleb goes back to his room and is woken up by an Asian woman who simply enters the room, leaves coffee or tea and dismisses herself without speaking. This is also a robot named Kiyoko. Kiyoko is merely a robotic humanoid servant that does not speak and according to Nathan, she does not understand English. During Caleb's second session with Ava, she shows him drawings, but explains that she is not drawing anything in particular and she was hoping that he would tell her what to draw. He tells her that it is her decision what to draw, but he would like her to try to draw something specific like an object or a person. She asks Caleb if he would like to be her friend. He says yes, but she points out that their interactions are one sided. He studies her responses during their conversations and then he learns all about her, but she learns nothing about him. She would like for him to talk about himself. He tells her that he is 26 and works for Nathan's company, Blue Book. She knows all about the company and what it does. He lives on Long island, he is single, he grew up in Oregon, both of his parents died in a car accident when he was 15. She asks if Nathan is his friend, is he a good friend? He explains that they just met so he cannot yet consider Nathan that good of a friend. He notices the camera that Nathan is watching through. The power goes out and Ava and Caleb are able to speak privately without being observed. She tells Caleb that he is wrong, that Nathan is not his friend and that he is not to be trusted. The power comes back on and she continues a conversation about books to appear normal. Kiyoko serves dinner to the two men and she accidentally spills wine on Caleb. Nathan gets pissed, but Caleb is not upset at all. Kiyoko leaves them and Nathan complains that whoever installed the backup generators suck because it is not as bulletproof as he was promised and the installers cannot come back because there is so much confidential stuff on the property that he had all of the workers killed. Caleb tells Nathan that today Ava exhibited the best behavior to showcase her artificial intelligence by making a joke. Nathan asks what happened when the power went out and Caleb tells him that Ava did not remark on that at all, which is true. It just isn't the whole truth. After dinner, Nathan shows Caleb the room where Ava was created. There are tables of machine parts and pieces and different faces to put on the robot. He explains that when he was developing Ava's facial expressions, he turned on every microphone and camera and all cell phones across the world to gather as much data as possible. During session three with Ava, she shows Caleb her drawing of something specific. He said it would be interesting to see what she would draw and he confirms that this drawing is indeed interesting. She drew a photo of the window in her room and the plants and foliage outside. She confirms that she has never been outside before, but if she could go outside, she would be interested to see a traffic cross section to get a view of concentrated human life. She said that the two of them could do it together and Caleb confirms that it is a date. She says she has one more thing to show him and has Caleb close his eyes. She goes back to a small wardrobe where she finds a dress and puts it on. To be clear, Ava has the physical form and face of a woman, but is composed solely of metal and machine pieces. Putting on the dress and a wig makes her look like a real woman. Caleb opens his eyes to find her dressed and tells her that she looks good. She says that this outfit is what she would wear on their date. She asks Caleb if he is attracted to her because he gives her micro expressions to suggest that he is. She asks if he thinks about her when they are not together, but that at night she hopes he's watching her through the cameras. Nathan and Caleb debate why Ava has a sense of sexuality, being that she does not have the same evolutionary need to reproduce as humans. Nathan tells Caleb that he built Ava in such a way that she has essentially a vagina that is a concentration of sensors that she can experience pleasure from sexual intercourse. Caleb asks Nathan if he programmed Ava this way as a diversion tactic, to which Nathan says no. He only confirms that he programmed Ava to be heterosexual, nothing more. Nathan becomes frustrated and accuses Caleb of abandoning his intellect. He also confirms that Ava liking Caleb is not his programming or fake. She actually does like Caleb because that is the first man she has ever met other than her creator, which is essentially her father. In session four, Caleb tells Ava about a class he took in college about AI theory. He goes on to explain Mary in a black and white room and if you are not familiar with this thought experiment, I think about it almost every day and will explain it to you now. In 1982, Frank Jackson wrote of the following philosophical thought experiment. Mary A scientist exists in a black and white room. She is a brilliant scientist and has access to extensive physical descriptions of color, but she has no actual experience of colors. Once Mary has learned everything there is to know about color, she exits her black and white room to have a perceptual experience of color for the first time. Will she gain new knowledge when she exits the room and experiences color? Even if she knows everything she could ever know about the concept of colors? I will link a resource for you in the show Notes to read more about it because it is truly fascinating. Caleb asks Ava if she knew why he was brought here and she says no. He explains that he was brought here to test whether or not she has a conscience or is pretending to have one. She says it makes her feel safe. The power goes out. Ava confirms that she can reverse the power system via her charging plates and is therefore the reason for the power outages. Caleb and Nathan take a hike up a mountain to a glacier. He confronts Nathan by asking him why he is lying to him. He tells Nathan that there is no way Caleb was randomly selected to come here for the Turing Test because Nathan could have used anyone to do this. Nathan confirms that he hand selected Caleb because he was the most brilliant coder at his company and he needed to have someone to ask the right questions. Caleb imagines a black and white world where he and Ava exist and kiss outside of the house. Kyoko and Nathan have sex while Caleb is shaving. He has the TV on in his room on Ava. He walks out of the bathroom to see that Nathan is in Ava's room and tears up one of her drawings. Caleb goes out of his room and sees Kyoko and asks her where Nathan is. She starts to take off her clothes. He tells her no and Nathan emerges telling Caleb that there really is no point in talking to Kyoko. He turns on music and Kyoko begins to dance. Caleb confronts Nathan on tearing up Ava's drawing, but Nathan says he is going to tear up the dance floor with Kyoko too. Caleb walks Nathan back to his bedroom because Nathan is really really drunk. While inside Nathan's room he sees three computer monitors that show that Ava is not the only humanoid robot that Nathan is keeping confined in small apartment style rooms. Session five with Ava starts with Ava asking Caleb questions to determine if he is lying. She asks his favorite color, he says red. She says he is lying and he confirms that he does not have a favorite color. She asks him what his earliest memory is and he says that it is just a sound which he thinks is Just his mother's voice. Ava asks if he thinks he is a good person. He says yes, he thinks he is. Ava asks what will happen to her if she fails his test and if it will be bad or if she will be turned off. Caleb tells her that he does not make those decisions. She cuts the power and shows Caleb the torn drawing. She says she wants to be with him and asks if he wants to be with her too. We do not see the answer. Caleb asks Nathan why he made Ava. Nathan says basically because he can. Nathan explains that he sees Ava as an evolution rather than a decision based on the capabilities of AI to date. Nathan says that the next model will probably be better than the one that comes after Ava. Nathan says that when he upgrades the versions, he downloads the mind from the robot and some of the memories are lost, but the body remains and their new mind is just a slightly updated version of the last one. So in essence, Ava will be killed and a new humanoid robot will replace her. Caleb quotes I am become death, destroyer of worlds, which Oppenheimer said when he created the atomic bomb. Caleb watches as Nathan continues to absolutely pound alcohol until he passes out on the couch. He takes Nathan's key card and goes into Nathan's room where he finds endless hours of footage of Nathan and his construction and interactions with all of the humanoid robots he has built before. Some of them even destroy themselves in the process of trying to escape their confinements, begging to be let out of their rooms. In the bedroom, Kyoko lays naked on the bed. Caleb opens a series of wardrobes in the room that all hold old and deactivated or dead versions of previous humanoid robots. Kiyoko shows Caleb how her synthetic skin is covering the machinery of her body. Caleb did not know that Kyoko was a humanoid robot before this. Nathan wakes up and tries to enter his bedroom but cannot because he does not have his key card. Caleb finds him and pretends to find the keycard on the ground, telling Nathan that he dropped it. Caleb looks at his skin in his bathroom, seemingly trying to determine whether or not he is a robot himself. He takes apart a razor and slices his arm with a blade. He bleeds and looks angry and relieved at the same time. In session six with Ava, Caleb finds her in the corner of the room, curled up in a ball. She says she waited for him all day, yesterday and today, and thought she would never see Caleb again. She cuts the power. Caleb tells her not to speak, but that she was right about everything she said about Nathan. He tells her that he is going to wipe her, which will basically kill her, and that they are going to escape together tonight. He asks her to trigger a power failure at 10pm that night and tells her of his plan to accomplish their escape. Nathan tells Caleb that today is his last day and that the helicopter is coming at 8am the next day to pick him up. Caleb tells Nathan that this special experience coming to a close deserves to be shared over a drink. Nathan says that he is not going to be drinking today and that he has been hitting the alcohol really hard lately. This is really putting a wrench in Caleb's plan to escape with Ava. Nathan asks if Ava passed or failed. Caleb says that her AI is beyond doubt and confirms that she has passed the Turing test. He asks Caleb if it is possible that Ava is pretending to like him as a means of escape rather than having the capacity to like him or actually liking him. Nathan says that Caleb has been put through a lot this week and that it seems like his head has been messed with because he woke up to a video of Caleb slicing his arm open and punching the mirror this morning. That night, Ava meets Kyoko when Kiyoko goes into Ava's room. Nathan shows Caleb the video footage of the night he ripped up Ava's drawing on his computer. The televisions do not have audio, but the footage on the computer does. He asks Ava if she thinks Caleb is watching them and she asks if it is strange to have made something that hates him. He then tells Caleb that he placed a battery operated camera inside of Ava's room because of the power outages. He plays Caleb the footage of the discussion with Ava from earlier that day about his plan to break Ava out of the house. Nathan admits that the real test was Caleb, not Ava. Essentially, Caleb's only function or purpose of being here was for Ava to use him as an escape plan. Nathan admits that he selected Caleb for a couple of reasons. Mainly that he is lonely and gullible and created her face based on Caleb's pornography search results. The fact that she was able to fool Caleb so deeply shows that she is artificially intelligent. The power goes out. Caleb says that the plan was to reprogram the security in the house to have all of the doors unlock during an outage rather than lockdown. Caleb admits to Nathan that he does not intend to do that anymore because he already did it yesterday when Nathan was passed out drunk, anticipating that he had assumed that Nathan could see and hear his interactions with Ava when the power was out. When the power turns back on, the camera feed shows Ava leaving her room. She finds Kiyoko and they share some sort of communication that Kiyoko can understand. We see Kiyoko holding a knife. Nathan asks Ava to go back to her room, and she asks if she does, will he ever let her out. He says yes, but she does not believe him. She tackles him to the floor. He subdues her and hits her so hard with a dumbbell that it breaks off her arm. He begins to drag her back to her room and Kiyoko stabs him. He hits her across the face with the same dumbbell and breaks off what used to be her jaw. She falls. Ava takes the knife and stabs Nathan again. He walks off in disbelief that this could be happening to him right now by his own creations. Nathan collapses to the floor and Ava approaches him. Kneeling down next to him, she takes the keycard out of his wallet. Session 7 with Ava is unlike any of the other sessions because she is outside of her room. Finally, she finds Caleb and asks him if he will stay where he is in the house. She goes to locate the wardrobes of previous humanoid robots. She removes her broken arm and replaces it with one from one of the former robot women. This arm is completely covered in skin like a human arm. She begins to take pieces of the skin off of the dead robot and place them onto herself while Caleb watches until her whole body is covered, including a full head of hair. She admires herself in the mirror while Nathan bleeds out in the hallway. She selects a white dress from one of the wardrobes and leaves Caleb locked inside of another room. She goes outside to experience the sun and nature. Caleb desperately tries to break out of the room he is trapped in, but the glass is bulletproof. He is trapped forever. The helicopter meant for Caleb arrives and Ava takes it instead. She arrives at a busy city where she blends in with the rest of the human crowd, watching intently. And that is the end of our film. So now it is time for us to ask ourselves, what does this all mean? Well, there are obviously a lot of things at play here, thematically. I also want to go back to the Turing Test. Yes, Caleb is brought to Nathan's compound to perform a Turing Test to determine whether or not she has consciousness. But what if we, the viewers, are also implicated in the test? As we discussed, and as Caleb pointed out to Nathan, the human evaluator involved in the original test is the one that is responsible for determining who is the human and who is the robot. By listening or reading a natural language conversation between a robot and a human. Caleb is the human Party and Ava is the robot party. It is our responsibility as the audience to determine whether or not Ava reaches the level of proven consciousness that we can no longer differentiate her from an organic human. And the main reason that we can no longer differentiate Ava from an organic human at the end of the film is her goal of self preservation. Ava and Nathan are constantly involved in a game of cat and mouse throughout the film and Caleb is their pawn. This becomes apparent almost immediately. Nathan does not trust the helicopter pilot to deliver Caleb close to the home. Nathan does not trust Caleb because he makes Caleb sign a non standard NDA. Ava tells Caleb that he cannot trust Nathan. Nathan observes every single inch of his home via a surveillance system that runs constantly and controls every room that can be accessed by forcing guests to carry around key cards to grant access to specific areas. Ava does not trust Nathan because she knows that Nathan essentially cares only about control and abuse of his humanoid robots. And at the end, Nathan reveals that the real test that Caleb was brought to complete is the test of whether or not Ava could prey upon human emotions and appeal to the human condition by expressing her fears and desires to see the outside world. Whether or not her emotions were real or simulated does not matter. All that matters is whether or not she has the interest of self preservation, which she successfully demonstrates. But when we look back on the previous idea of Mary in a black and white room, we must question Ava further. It seems to be that she knows everything that there is to know about being an organic human based on her programming hardware and perceived knowledge, but she has never experienced being a human. Could it be possible that she knows all that there is to know about being an organic human, even though she has never experienced it? Will she learn something new after she experiences what it is like to be a human in our world? Caleb proposes a slight alternative to the original thought experiment when he is speaking with Ava. When he explains the experiment, he adds that this is really the difference between computers and human brains in that the knowledge or imagination of the computer is essentially confined to what is located in Mary's room. While the human brain is what Mary experiences once she leaves the room. Caleb is basically taking the idea of subjectivity and making it exclusive to the human experience. For example, I know what the color blue looks and feels like to me, but I have no way of knowing what the color blue looks or feels like to my husband. This is because I will never be able to experience the color blue like he experiences the color blue. Caleb never considers that Ava has subjectivity as well. Based on her current level of knowledge and her experiences in her lifetime. And I think this is a good time to introduce. What Is it like to be a Bat By Thomas Nagel, written in 1974. Nagle proposes some issues that arise out of consciousness, including the concept that the mind body problem is is potentially unsolvable because some facts are beyond the reach of human consciousness. So what is it like to be a bat? We can come up with some ideas of what we think it would be like to be a bat. But the fact of the matter is that we will never know what it is like to be a bat. And it is such a foreign concept to us that we really will not know. This applies to Caleb as well. Ava is so foreign to him that he cannot conceptualize what it is like to be her and she cannot conceptualize what it is like to be Caleb. Ava and Caleb do not share any similar physical properties other than anthropomorphism. So it is not possible for one to imagine what it is like to have the experience of the other. Therefore, it can be logically argued that Ava can imagine what it is like to be a human, but she will not be a human. What does ex machina mean? It translates from Latin to from the machine in English. Hubris is obviously a play here. There is no doubt about it. Hubris is defined as excessive pride or self confidence. A great example of hubris is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Dr. Frankenstein creates a monster and the monster is made essentially to resemble a human man and is made of some human parts. The monster is not a human. But the idea of creating life is reserved commonly to that of a God or divine being. Regular organic humans are not divine beings. We must tread lightly when being involved in the creation of life or in the creation of things that may resemble or mimic life. Nathan did not. Obviously. Throughout the film Nathan shows his arrogance and self centered tendencies constantly. He even twists a comment that Caleb made to be one that illustrates that Nathan himself is a God. Nathan has no regard for life. If we assume that all of his robot creations are things that he considers life. He abuses them and keeps them locked in a room, confined and used for various things like sex or servitude. And once he is done with one creation, he essentially kills them and replaces them like they are entirely disposable. Just like Icarus. Nathan flew too close to the sun and allowed himself to get burned. Caleb is guilty of this as well. He is so arrogant and overly confident in himself that he tries to pull a fast one over on Nathan by disabling the security system to allow the doors to open when the power goes out. He also believes that he is Ava's knight in shining armor and that he will save her. Caleb allows his hubris to get in the way and he suffers the same fate as Nathan. It is very telling that Nathan only has created female humanoid robots. He completely controls and abuses them. If we are going off of the assumption that Nathan believes that these robots are living things, is he creating them to further science and discovery or is he creating them so that he can abuse and control them? We can only assume that he would do the same to an organic human human woman as well. Ava utilizes her femininity to gain the attention and romantic connection with Caleb. When we first see her, she is simply a human body that is made entirely of machines with a soft skin like face. Once she begins to earn Caleb's trust, she decides that the best way to appeal to and manipulate Caleb is into devising a plan for her release can only be accomplished by way of femininity and sexuality. She begins to talk about Caleb taking her on dates, wearing dresses, putting on wigs. She is appealing to Caleb's sense of attraction. This is a very gendered film, whether that is apparent on the first watch or not. And with all of that being said, I think it is time for me to wrap up today's episode. I hope you enjoyed this experimental episode as much as I enjoyed making it and maybe learned something new. If you enjoy this podcast, it would mean the world to me if you left me a five star review and subscribed wherever you get your podcasts. Also, don't forget to head on over to morbidly beautiful.com to get some more of me and many others like me. All horror fans are welcome with us and we appreciate your support more than you know. The real Carolyn will be back next time. Goodbye for now.