“Erasing the boundary between man and machine means blurring the boundary between men and gods.". The tagline of Ex Machina it is clear: what we are about to witness is not just any film about cyborgs or artificial intelligence, but one profound and disturbing reflection on the ethics of creation, on the meaning of conscience, and what the future development of these AIs, and what implications and consequences might arise from this.

In the movie Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), programmer, wins the opportunity to take on a secret project for a week with Nathan (Oscar Isaac), owner and creator of the software company Caleb works for. Upon arrival at his luxurious residence, completely isolated, everything is already set up: during the week Caleb will have to participate in a variation of the Turing test under the careful and constant surveillance of Nathan. A variation, because Nathan quickly reveals that Ava (Alicia Vikander), the subject that Caleb will have to test, he is a robot: what Caleb will have to establish, then, is whether Ava possesses a conscience, an emotional intelligence that can bring it closer to a human being.

During the seven sessions Caleb and Ava have the opportunity to get closer and get to know each other, until you like each other. But all is not as it seems: short circuits and blackouts give Ava the opportunity to speak with Caleb in private, which is not allowed to them during the sessions, when Nathan's many cameras and microphones can catch their every breath and expression. During these stolen moments Ava will beg Caleb to free her from her glass prison and warn him to keep his guard up, Why Nathan is not the man he appears and its actions and purposes are far more sinister than the programmer can imagine.

Caleb thus finds himself suspended between two uncertainties: fidarsi di una persona reale, che egli sa essere un genio dell’intelligenza artificiale e della programmazione, o credere alla sua creazione, per la quale sta iniziando a provare un vero affetto ed attrazione. Questo suo dibattito interiore lo porterà a mettere in discussione sé stesso e tutto ciò che egli reputa reale, e saranno le sue azioni e decisioni a determinare il futuro di tutti e tre gli attori dell’opera, and of the course of all humanity.

artificial intelligence

(Photo on Author are Pixabay)

In Caleb's words the Turing test is "when a human interacts with a computer. And if the human does not understand interacting with a computer, the test is passed"; if the test is passed, it means that the computer has an artificial intelligence.

The Turing test is named after its creator, Alan Turing, mathematical, cryptologist, logical, and one of the founding fathers of computing. In his article of 1950 he describes the test as a game in which there are three players: a car (A), a man (B), and an interrogator (C). The interrogator, separate from the other two, ask questions of both for try to figure out who is human and who is machine. If C is fooled a considerable number of times, la macchina può essere considerata dotata di intelligenza artificiale, dal momento che non è distinguibile da un essere umano. Da notare è come nel film la macchina A è Ava, che condivide la propria iniziale anche con la parola artificiale, ed il proprio nome, seppur modificato, con Eva.

Il test di Turing si occupa unicamente di come agisce il soggetto, adopting a functionalist approach to the human mind: it only tells us whether a person can be deceived or not, but not whether the machine understands the information it processes and returns. The objective of the test is therefore not to ascribe a conscience to the car. This critical issue had been anticipated by Turing, who already in his article stated how the purpose of the test was not to solve the mystery of human consciousness.

Since its proposal, the Turing test seems to have been surpassed by several chatbots, from ELIZA, a speech processing program created in 1966 since Joseph Weizenbaum, computer science professor at MIT and one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence. ELIZA simulated a conversation with its users by parodying a Rogersian therapist, during which the therapist often repeats the patient's words. So, if the user wrote, eg, “I feel sad today”, an answer ELIZA could have given would have been “what makes you sad today?”; and so on.

Although several computers and programs have been proven to pass the Turing test, it is more likely that these programs have used tricks to overcome it, rather than having demonstrated actual significant intelligence. And progress of machine learning, of the deep learning and natural language processing have made this technological advancement possible.

This year machine learning and deep learning there are two subfields of artificial intelligence that focus on’automatic data processing and machine learning. This year machine learning it is a technique used to ensure that machines can learn from data and improve their performance without being explicitly programmed for each specific situation. This year deep learning is a subcategory of machine learning, and uses deep artificial neural networks to learn and represent data in a hierarchical manner. Deep neural networks are inspired by the functioning of the human brain and are composed of multiple layers of computational units called artificial neurons.

All these technological advances have led to November 2022 to launch of ChatGPT, a language model developed by OpenAI, developed with machine learning techniques, including those discussed so far. Since its launch, ChatGPT has attracted a wide range of reactions, both positive and negative. Among the controversies we can here mention those of ethical character, such as safeguarding the personal data of those who use it and generating information that is sometimes misleading and dangerous. We have seen how ChatGPT can generate non-existent sources when these are explicitly requested: a lawyer in the United States last week he used the chatbot to write a defense brief for its client, which was rejected by the court as it cited dozens of fictitious cases.

Then there are the controversies of moral character, such as using chatbots to write academic or research papers: many scientific journals, including Nature, now require the authors to explain the use of text generation tools if they are used; while instead the magazine Science announced in January a total ban of these tools.

However, not all AI comes to harm: for example, in recent years the use of these technologies has been implemented in the medical field with numerous positive implications. AIs can decode information grouped within data and be used to recognize patterns and patterns present.

A look to the future

What will it be, right in correspondence of the telomeres, the future of these AIs? According to Nathan, the development of these is simply inevitable: “artificial intelligences will remember us as upright apes destined for extinction”, he claims, certain of their superiority and of their future prevarication. Companies like Microsoft and Google have already announced the intention to incorporate AIs like ChatGPT into their products. There is already the fear that some jobs may be replaced by bots, especially those in which repetitive and generic tasks prevail.

To avoid the most risky consequences, far-sighted precautionary and protective measures are necessary. Italy was the first country in the world to suspend the use of ChatGPT, second an investigation of the Privacy Guarantor, for the protection of personal data and due to the absence of systems for verifying the age of minors. The availability of the service was then restored following OpenAI's adoption of the measures imposed by the Guarantor.

A questo punto diventa forse semplice abbandonarsi alle paure e alle ansie del progresso delle IA. I film fantascientifici di certo non aiutano: sembra che ciò che ci aspetti è la presa di coscienza dei bot, and their resulting tyranny. But instead of imagining dystopian scenarios we should ask ourselves why our creations, once you become aware, they should resort to violence, and what this says about ourselves. Discussions of artificial intelligence reflect not technological progress but the human ego.

Artificial intelligence is by definition a somewhat narcissistic field of research: its goal is the creation of a technology that mirrors human beings in their final form. One of the main themes of Ex Machina is that ofethics of creation. Wanting to create an individual, and the doing “in our image and likeness” mirrors Nathan's self-centeredness, that, only in its research center, surrounded by hectares and hectares of forest, si crede un dio. Quando Caleb mormora “Se hai creato una macchina cosciente, non si tratta della storia dell’uomo: questa è la storia degli dèi”, Nathan istintivamente presume che il “dio” a cui fa riferimento sia lui stesso, dove Ava è la sua Eva e la sua vasta tenuta incontaminata è una sorta di Giardino dell’Eden.

L’orrore in Ex Machina non è basato su una possibilità di orrore futuro, ma su quello che stiamo vivendo ora. Il regista Alex Garland, per NPR, parla di “paranoia tencologica” per definire lo stato di profonda ansia che proviamo nel vivere a diretto contatto con delle tecnologie in continuo progresso, che comprendiamo sempre meno. Le IA acquisiranno consapevolezza di sé e la useranno per distruggerci? Probabilmente no, ma dobbiamo essere consapevoli di cosa stiamo creando, e dobbiamo farlo pensando a chi rischia maggiormente le conseguenze di queste.

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