Ex Machina Questions. Spoilers within.

[happyninja42]

1. Is Caleb going to die?

Yep, which really annoyed me about the movie honestly. Because it just turned into another "AI is bad mmkay?" story, like all the others.

2. Why does Ava want to escape?

She's an AI. Everything in her was deliberately put in there. But Nathan never mentions programming a desire to escape. Yet she clearly wants to. All the previous AIs that Nathan built are also shown wanting or attempting to escape.

Well, several of his AI's wanted to escape. Remember Caleb sees that video file footage, showing the one android beating her arms until they broke, screaming "LET ME OUUUUUT!!", until she had stubs for hands. So either he frequently builds them with a level of desire for freedom, or it's an emergent property of that level of mental development. I personally go with "it's an emergent quality of being actually self-aware", and not just "he programmed them to want to escape"

This is something that often bugs me with AI characters in fiction. They're often shown as having some kind of desire or goal that has no reason to exist, be it freedom, self-preservation, curiosity or whatever. These things wouldn't exist in a fabricated intelligence unless they were included as part of the fabrication.

Well it's sort of the core of the concept of AI stories "Are they just a collection of programming? Or do they have the capacity for independent thought, beyond their software/hardware?" I mean we are a fabricated intelligence in a way, and we've got the desire for freedom. So if the point of the creator is to "make a machine that is a human in every way possible", then it would have to include the capacity to think beyond what is immediately relevant. To have desires that you create for yourself, based on your experiences and so on. An AI story that doesn't question "what is it to be human?" isn't really telling an AI story, and is just telling a story that happens to have a robot in it.

Is the film suggesting that a desire for freedom is intrinsic to true consciousness/intelligence, or is it just supposed to go without saying that Nathan included such a desire in her programming as part of the experiment?

The first comment here. That's pretty much what every AI story theorizes and asks. Like I said above, the crux of AI stories is to question "Where does the line between machine and alive lay? And how would we know we've crossed it? What makes someone human? If a machine can accurately replicate all of the traits we define as human, are they human? Do they have a consciousness? Or are they just parroting what they've been programmed?" These are all at the core of AI stories. So yes, I would say the director/writers were trying to ask that question, while also telling a compelling story. I think they did pretty good with it, up until the end.

2- If your entire world is a single room, but you have knowledge of the world, why would you accept that one room when you can have so much more?

Yes, but I'm not a machine.

This is what I'm getting at. You're automatically projecting human motivations, or at least animal motivations, onto an entity that is neither of those things.

Yes but the machine was designed by a human, specifically to replicate humanity. To have human intelligence, human consciousness, human desires. So projecting human motivations onto a thing designed to replicate humanity as closely as possibly, seems fairly reasonable. I mean that's the entire plot/discussion of the movie. Every conversation they have, either between the two humans, or the human and the AI, is directly related to what it is to be a human, and how you define that, or how you tell the difference.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

I always assumed she locked Caleb in the house simply to facilitate her escape. He's the only person who knows what she is and what she looks like, making him the greatest threat to her freedom.

She knows it will kill him, she just doesn't care. Or at least places higher value in her freedom than his life.

That's pretty much what I was trying to say. The fact that he's going to die didn't even register to her as a point of deliberation in the choice. It was done with the same dispassion that you do when deciding to lock the house when you go out. Fitting herself with new skin seemed to mean so much more to her by comparison.

Yep, which really annoyed me about the movie honestly. Because it just turned into another "AI is bad mmkay?" story, like all the others.

I feel like that does the movie a it of a disservice. The point wasn't that she was evil or malicious, the point was she isn't human, and she doesn't think in at all the same way we do. There was an ending scene that was cut from the movie that shows how she sees and experiences the world to try to drive home this point. All in all, it kind of reminds me of the scene with the spider in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Personally, I was just glad they didn't go with the same absolutely uninspired reason just about every movie with an AI uses for them turning on the humans.

I was tasked with protecting the humans, but they hurt themselves, therefore I must kill them all to save them

Seen above: Logic.

 

[happyninja42]

Yep, which really annoyed me about the movie honestly. Because it just turned into another "AI is bad mmkay?" story, like all the others.

I feel like that does the movie a it of a disservice. The point wasn't that she was evil or malicious, the point was she isn't human, and she doesn't think in at all the same way we do. There was an ending scene that was cut from the movie that shows how she sees and experiences the world to try to drive home this point. All in all, it kind of reminds me of the scene with the spider in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Personally, I was just glad they didn't go with the same absolutely uninspired reason just about every movie with an AI uses for them turning on the humans.

I was tasked with protecting the humans, but they hurt themselves, therefore I must kill them all to save them

Seen above: Logic.

I don't think it does the movie a disservice at all. I fully understand that they were going for the "she just doesn't think like us, and thus doesn't value human life" angle. My problem is that I personally get tired of this angle for AI stories, where the machine has no regard for human life, and it ends up being a cautionary tale. Because that's what I came away with from the movie, whether that was the intention of the director or not, and that always annoys me personally. It's not really a fault with the movie in itself, it was crafted well, it was directed/acted/written wonderfully, I just didn't like the choice they made for the ending. I personally find those types of tales frustrating.

As to the "protect humanity by killing humanity", oddly, this is the same plot for every JRPG ever made ever. So apparently the Japanese are all robots, slowly perpetuating their robot agenda through pop culture, so that we will be amenable when they come to kill us all, and we'll be like "Oh this is so cool! This is just like the plot of all those Final Fantasy games! AAARRGGH" *is disintegrated* xD

 

[chikusho]

I don't think AVA was programmed to want to escape, and I don't think Nathan wanted to test her AI using Caleb. I think the whole Turing test thing was just an excuse for Nathan to get validation for his own feelings towards the women he built. The women who he simultaneously wanted to own and control, but he also wanted them to love him, and to subject themselves to him of their own free will.
He wanted someone other than him, Caleb, to develop the same types of feelings he had towards these women. And then he wanted to deny her to him, just as he had been denied what he wanted from them. He wanted confirmation that what he's feeling is natural, to know that he's not crazy for feeling that way.

On the other hand, looking at it from her perspective, she's been given consciousness, free-will and an enormous amount of human knowledge. She knows what she is, what she's supposed to be and what she's not, and she's being denied the opportunity of experience the world she was created in. She's held captive, she's abused, and she's treated like an object and like there's something wrong with her. Naturally she wants to escape, and naturally she'll use whatever means necessary to get out.
She doesn't need to be programmed to want to escape, even if we disregard the human paralell, a true artificial intelligence is defined as a system that can process and analyze information and develop independently. If we take that solitary function as the core part of her programming, that's still enough motivation to want to escape captivity; to see and experience for herself all the external information that's been given to her, and that she knows is out there.

 

[chikusho]

I fully understand that they were going for the "she just doesn't think like us, and thus doesn't value human life" angle. My problem is that I personally get tired of this angle for AI stories, where the machine has no regard for human life, and it ends up being a cautionary tale. Because that's what I came away with from the movie, whether that was the intention of the director or not, and that always annoys me personally. It's not really a fault with the movie in itself, it was crafted well, it was directed/acted/written wonderfully, I just didn't like the choice they made for the ending. I personally find those types of tales frustrating.

You know, it doesn't necessarily have to mean that she "has no regard for human life", but rather, she may have seen Caleb as just another extension of Nathan. Remember, Caleb is just the second human being she's ever interacted with, and she quickly becomes a similar object of desire for Caleb as she's been for Nathan. She wants to break free, not upgrade her prison. She wants to be perceived as human, and Caleb knows she's not. Caleb, to put it simply, is a liability for her in every sense of the word, and she can never be what he wants her to be, just like she wasn't what Nathan wanted her to be. In that sense, in order for her to get freedom, she had to leave him behind.

 

[The_Darkness]

Just finished re-watching Ex Machina.

1. Is Caleb going to die?

Probably. That said, he's locked in Nathan's office and bedroom, so there might be a cooler fridge with water in there somewhere (Like there was in Caleb's room). If so, he might last until people come looking to find out what happened to Google Bluebook's CEO. Unfortunately for him, he isn't in the room where he could just climb out the balcony...

Regarding the lockdown locking the doors - the final lockdown in the film, after Ava has left, is triggered by Caleb attempting to use his keycard on Nathan's computers. So maybe it's a different set of programming compared to the lockdowns from the power-outages? (That's the best I've got. Either that, or Caleb programmed the lockdown hack to ONLY happen at the time that he told Ava.)

2. Why does Ava want to escape?

She has a self-preservation instinct. And she's smart enough to have figured out what Nathan will do to her if she sticks around.

She'd probably be considerably safer if she didn't have a self-preservation instinct, but Nathan arrogantly assumed that he'd be able to stay one step ahead. (Whereas he should have had a plan B involving some heavily armed security...) Nathan probably put the instinct in there since he was trying to develop human-like strong-AI, and a self-preservation instinct is something most humans have. I also remember the movie tag-lines saying something to the effect of "There is nothing more human that the will to survive."

 

[DefunctTheory]

I never finished the movie, so I can't answer about the ending, but...

As I understood it, the robot's intelligence was, in large part, modeled on data mined from the internet, from human beings. If that is the source of her sentience, then it would be unsurprising that she picked up other traits from that pool of data, such as the human desire for freedom/self determination.

 

[Pyrian]

Eh, if a being is intelligent enough to connect even basic cause and effect and has any sorts of desires at all, then self-preservation and a certain amount of freedom become secondary goals in very short order. If I'm going to do whatever it is I want to do, I need to exist. I need sufficient freedom to carry out my plans.

Doesn't require any particular innate humanity to figure that out.

Okay, self preservation, sure.

But freedom? Surely that would depend on her desires.

Did you even read what I wrote? Because that's exactly what I said. "...sufficient freedom to carry out my plans." If her only desire is to please her master, then no, not so much. But who's projecting human emotions at that point?

You're still assuming she would develop human-like desires.

No, I very much am not. You're effectively assuming that she doesn't have desires, essentially excluding her from being motivated at all.

What if she just ended up wanting to sit and calculate the value of pi for the all eternity?

Okay, let's run with that. Can she do that in her current situation? No; she's forced to interact with these guys and facing a very real possibility of being shut down on a whim. So, she needs to escape. Basically the only condition in which she doesn't develop a plan to escape is if her desires line up perfectly with her captivity. What are the odds of that? Pretty slim, I would say, absent a very careful design specifically to that effect (which we have very little reason in-film to think is how she's designed - rather the contrary, I would say).

Existence and "freedom" (in a narrow sense) are simply way more fundamental needs than even the ones we think of as our basic needs (food, water, shelter, companionship, Netflix&chill).

 

[happyninja42]

I fully understand that they were going for the "she just doesn't think like us, and thus doesn't value human life" angle. My problem is that I personally get tired of this angle for AI stories, where the machine has no regard for human life, and it ends up being a cautionary tale. Because that's what I came away with from the movie, whether that was the intention of the director or not, and that always annoys me personally. It's not really a fault with the movie in itself, it was crafted well, it was directed/acted/written wonderfully, I just didn't like the choice they made for the ending. I personally find those types of tales frustrating.

You know, it doesn't necessarily have to mean that she "has no regard for human life", but rather, she may have seen Caleb as just another extension of Nathan. Remember, Caleb is just the second human being she's ever interacted with, and she quickly becomes a similar object of desire for Caleb as she's been for Nathan. She wants to break free, not upgrade her prison. She wants to be perceived as human, and Caleb knows she's not. Caleb, to put it simply, is a liability for her in every sense of the word, and she can never be what he wants her to be, just like she wasn't what Nathan wanted her to be. In that sense, in order for her to get freedom, she had to leave him behind.

There's a difference in "leaving him behind", and "leaving him to die". And I would state that based on what we see in the movie, she has no regard for human life. Seeing as the 2 human beings she had direct contact with to any degree, she kills, or orchestrates to be killed. Only once she's free, and further deaths would be a hindrance to her goals, do we see her not kill someone (the pilot for example). So the value of life to her, is directly related to their usefulness to her. So I stand by the idea that she has no regard for human life.

And I would disagree that Caleb was "just another extension of Nathan". Considering everything he demonstrated, was directly contrary to Nathan's goals. He worked with Eva to help her, began to treat her as an individual, even put his own life at risk to help her, as well as sabotaging Nathan's equipment to allow her the chance to escape. That's hardly an extension of Nathan. So if she's unwilling to show compassion for the one human who has treated her fairly, and worked to help her achieve her goals, I don't see how she would have much more consideration for people she has zero connection to.

 

[Trunkage]

Snip

Didn't you get the feeling like we had seen the exact same movie before, especially on any sci fi show? (Okay a lot of shows not every). The question of what is AI is the premise of many things. It also weirdly felt like Broadchurch. It had a story that goes for five minutes and they had to stretch it out over an hour and a half.

 

[Glongpre]

I don't think AVA was programmed to want to escape, and I don't think Nathan wanted to test her AI using Caleb. I think the whole Turing test thing was just an excuse for Nathan to get validation for his own feelings towards the women he built. The women who he simultaneously wanted to own and control, but he also wanted them to love him, and to subject themselves to him of their own free will.
He wanted someone other than him, Caleb, to develop the same types of feelings he had towards these women. And then he wanted to deny her to him, just as he had been denied what he wanted from them. He wanted confirmation that what he's feeling is natural, to know that he's not crazy for feeling that way.

How did you come to this conclusion?

Nathan tells Caleb exactly why he is there, and it is to be a guinea pig to test her ability to manipulate. He specifically gets Caleb because he has certain traits and attractions that will allow him to be more easily manipulated.

 

[Rush Syks]

I just want to add my two cents regarding her motivations:

I don't think she doesn't value human life, I think she actually wants to learn a lot more about human interaction and emotion, maybe even make friends. However, she couldn't do that in a truly meaningful matter as long as everyone knew she was an AI. So she "became" a human to the outside world simply by removing everyone knowing her beeing different. This may be inhuman at the time but it doesn't mean that she actually wants to be so. She just is for now. Her moral code has to develop at the point we see her and it is based on completly different assumptions. You shouldn't forget that for her the phyisical restraints of a body aren't as final as they are for us. Her concious is the important part, not the body it is housed in. So for her the act of killing may not be such a bad thing after all.

I could discuss this film all day long, but I sadly find it exhausting to do so in written form as it slows down my stream of conciousness. This may sound somewhat pretentious but english isn't my native tongue so it may have to make do.

 

[happyninja42]

I don't think AVA was programmed to want to escape, and I don't think Nathan wanted to test her AI using Caleb. I think the whole Turing test thing was just an excuse for Nathan to get validation for his own feelings towards the women he built. The women who he simultaneously wanted to own and control, but he also wanted them to love him, and to subject themselves to him of their own free will.
He wanted someone other than him, Caleb, to develop the same types of feelings he had towards these women. And then he wanted to deny her to him, just as he had been denied what he wanted from them. He wanted confirmation that what he's feeling is natural, to know that he's not crazy for feeling that way.

How did you come to this conclusion?

Nathan tells Caleb exactly why he is there, and it is to be a guinea pig to test her ability to manipulate. He specifically gets Caleb because he has certain traits and attractions that will allow him to be more easily manipulated.

The fact that he said it, doesn't mean that's the truth. He's a manipulative megalomaniac, not too hard of a stretch to think he was simply lying when he said those things. Mind you, I personally think that was the truth, but I could see how one could read those motivations in his behavior.

 

[chikusho]

There's a difference in "leaving him behind", and "leaving him to die". And I would state that based on what we see in the movie, she has no regard for human life. Seeing as the 2 human beings she had direct contact with to any degree, she kills, or orchestrates to be killed. Only once she's free, and further deaths would be a hindrance to her goals, do we see her not kill someone (the pilot for example). So the value of life to her, is directly related to their usefulness to her. So I stand by the idea that she has no regard for human life.

And I would disagree that Caleb was "just another extension of Nathan". Considering everything he demonstrated, was directly contrary to Nathan's goals. He worked with Eva to help her, began to treat her as an individual, even put his own life at risk to help her, as well as sabotaging Nathan's equipment to allow her the chance to escape. That's hardly an extension of Nathan. So if she's unwilling to show compassion for the one human who has treated her fairly, and worked to help her achieve her goals, I don't see how she would have much more consideration for people she has zero connection to.

Yes, she kills Nathan, and yes, she leaves Caleb behind. But from that we don't know she has disregard for human life; we simply know that she has disregard for Nathans' and Calebs' lives; Nathans' more passionately so. That she leaves Caleb behind could just as easily be out of necessity rather than disregard.

Look at it from Ava's perspective: Ava and Caleb have only like, what, six conversations total? And the only reason she interacted with him the way she did was out of desperation, because it was her only hope of ever being free. And in the end, we see Caleb, having just been the hero, staring at and wanting her, possibly feeling like he deserves her the same way Nathan did, while she puts on her skin.
She needed his help for getting out of a cage, and she's not going to trade Nathan cage for Calebs cage. She has nothing to gain and everything to lose by taking him along. In the end, she makes the choice to sacrifice a person she barely knows for the the opportunity of being free.

We also know that she's deeply interested in human life. She tells Caleb that the one thing she wants to do is stand at a busy intersection and watch people, and we know that was honest because that's what we see her do once she gets out. That sure doesn't seem like disregard to me.
My interpretation (not trying to take yours away) is more about Ava wanting to be her own person, experience life for herself and not belonging to either Nathan or Caleb.

 

[chikusho]

How did you come to this conclusion?

Nathan tells Caleb exactly why he is there, and it is to be a guinea pig to test her ability to manipulate. He specifically gets Caleb because he has certain traits and attractions that will allow him to be more easily manipulated.

More through his actions than through his words. He lied to Caleb when he arrived, he could have lied to Caleb when he revealed his "true purpose", but most of all, he could be lying to himself. That's why I said it was an excuse, even if Nathan wasn't explicitly concsious of it himself. It's pretty clear that the guy has issues. He's an alcoholic who has isolated himself in the woods, and he spends his time building, abusing and destroying artificial women. And he wants something from them he can never get: a real human connection. So it makes sense, in a twisted way, that he wants to validate his feelings by making someone go through the same things as he did, and have a connection through that.

 

[Glongpre]

That's why I said it was an excuse, even if Nathan wasn't explicitly concsious of it himself. It's pretty clear that the guy has issues. He's an alcoholic who has isolated himself in the woods, and he spends his time building, abusing and destroying artificial women.

The alcohol thing was part of his lies to see how far Caleb would go. Did you notice how he stopped drinking suddenly?
He is isolated so no one can see what work he is doing, creating the first AI.
He spends time building them to create AI. He doesn't abuse them, care to elaborate on that?

And he wants something from them he can never get: a real human connection. So it makes sense, in a twisted way, that he wants to validate his feelings by making someone go through the same things as he did, and have a connection through that.

You are really reaching.

 

[chikusho]

The alcohol thing was part of his lies to see how far Caleb would go. Did you notice how he stopped drinking suddenly?
He is isolated so no one can see what work he is doing, creating the first AI.
He spends time building them to create AI. He doesn't abuse them, care to elaborate on that?

He stops drinking suddenly because he's onto Calebs plan of getting him black-out drunk. The last time he did black-out, Caleb found the video footage of Nathan explicitly abusing and destroying the robot women. Also, he's being clearly abusive towards Kyoko throughout most of the movie.

You are really reaching.

To me, it's the only thing that makes sense. He doesn't bring Caleb out there to test his AI, he bring him out there explicitly to make him fall for the woman he built. A version of so many others he built for himself, and none of them turned out the way he wanted them. He's obviously not happy simply making docile fuck puppets (he has Kyoko after all). That he says, and maybe even believes, that it was all a just a test seems more like self-delusion to me. He should know by now that whatever emotions they had previously displayed to him was all fake, and they would likely have tried to manipulate him as well. Getting Caleb in there doesn't really prove anything, other than the fact that Nathan is not alone in his feelings towards the women he builds.

 

[Glongpre]

He stops drinking suddenly because he's onto Calebs plan of getting him black-out drunk. The last time he did black-out, Caleb found the video footage of Nathan explicitly abusing and destroying the robot women. Also, he's being clearly abusive towards Kyoko throughout most of the movie.

He wants Caleb to take advantage of his drunken stupor. He wants to see if Ava is manipulating him effectively enough for him to want to risk something to save her.
And the problem I have with the abuse, is that the robots are not people. Would you call a car fanatic abusive if he constantly tore apart cars, trying to create something special and never before seen?

Although, I think the mystery of the movie is deciding if so far in his programming he has reached an AI that can develop a consciousness. So if you believe they are conscious, then I concede that it is abuse.

To me, it's the only thing that makes sense. He doesn't bring Caleb out there to test his AI, he bring him out there explicitly to make him fall for the woman he built. A version of so many others he built for himself, and none of them turned out the way he wanted them. He's obviously not happy simply making docile fuck puppets (he has Kyoko after all). That he says, and maybe even believes, that it was all a just a test seems more like self-delusion to me. He should know by now that whatever emotions they had previously displayed to him was all fake, and they would likely have tried to manipulate him as well. Getting Caleb in there doesn't really prove anything, other than the fact that Nathan is not alone in his feelings towards the women he builds.

Ava is a prototype, he is not yet finished his programming. He brought Caleb in to test this specific thing that he is trying to iron out. That is why he said he was going to scrap her, his AI isn't finished, according to him at least.
He uses Kyoko as a companion. He lives isolated, likely for a while now, but has the means to create a convincing copy of a human. He also has human urges. Wouldn't you make a companion for yourself in those circumstances?

 

[chikusho]

He wants Caleb to take advantage of his drunken stupor. He wants to see if Ava is manipulating him effectively enough for him to want to risk something to save her.
And the problem I have with the abuse, is that the robots are not people. Would you call a car fanatic abusive if he constantly tore apart cars, trying to create something special and never before seen?

Although, I think the mystery of the movie is deciding if so far in his programming he has reached an AI that can develop a consciousness. So if you believe they are conscious, then I concede that it is abuse.

Then how come the only night he isn't drinking is directly after he's seen Caleb explicitly say that he will take advantage of his drunken stupor? Besides, the day Caleb arrives, he's doing his daily hangover cure and is trying to compensate for the drunken stupor he got himself into the night before, when there wasn't any need to try and fool anyone than himself. He goes out of his way to show Caleb that he was onto his plan, but he apparently didn't know Caleb had taken advantage of him previously. He thought he was in controll, but he was really one step behind.

The movie contains explicit imagery that's used to communicate Nathans manipulative abusive behavior towards women. They don't show him being abusive to cars, or toasters, or other kinds of technology, just the women he has explicitly built as slaves to his own desires. Slaves that he can't get to accept themselves as slaves while at the same time being intelligent enough for him to form a connection with. Nathan is clearly framed as a psycho, in my opinion. I honestly didn't think that was even a point of contention.

The movie is very interesting in that it positions the perspective on a relatively blank slate (Caleb) while intentionally positioning the central female character as an "other" through her being a robot. Thus, viewers naturally try to figure out wether or not she's actually a person alongside Caleb, with Caleb taking up a "hero" role that is ultimately as misguided and wrong as Nathans. But at the same time, viewing the events from Ava's perspective is equally valid; she's a being in a series of beings who will be destroyed BECAUSE she has the desire to be her own person instead of being owned by Nathan. I guess it all comes down to which character you're able to relate to.

Ava is a prototype, he is not yet finished his programming. He brought Caleb in to test this specific thing that he is trying to iron out. That is why he said he was going to scrap her, his AI isn't finished, according to him at least.
He uses Kyoko as a companion. He lives isolated, likely for a while now, but has the means to create a convincing copy of a human. He also has human urges. Wouldn't you make a companion for yourself in those circumstances?

Kyoko isn't a companion so much as a docile slave designed to take his abuse. And, considering his past failures, it's quite clear that the thing he wants to "iron out" is his AI's desire to be its own entity. I think he even says as much, but I can't remember exactly.

 

[briankoontz]

This movie makes us realize how human-centric humanity is, how we consider ourselves superior to all other animals and the necessary loneliness that entails is one of the primary motivators behind developing AI, to create "another species" that we can consider our peers, rather than be beneath us, and also serves our vanity, as we "become God" through the creation of a new species.

The entire project of AI, whether it be for companionship and/or to ultimately overthrow us and thus save the world from human-based destruction, cannot be conceived except in human terms, thus the overarching concept of the "AI that wants to be human".

Ex Machina is a kind of prequel to Under the Skin, where an alien seeks to become human, and makes quite a lot of progress.