Final: It's a kill or be killed world, avoid AI at all cost!

            Imagine this: you’re going on a first date with someone you started talking to online. You’ve never met them before, but you hit it off through a Facebook message, so you plan to get a couple of drinks. The date is going great, but something seems a little off about them. You just chalk it up to the drinks or the leftover pizza you had for lunch. They invite you over and you oblige. While hanging out at their place, you notice there are no pictures on the walls, no keepsakes of any kind on the shelves. You walk into the kitchen where your date is chopping up some vegetables to snack on, they turn to look at you and accidentally cut their hand. They don’t flinch, and there’s no blood. There are sparks coming from the wound instead. You tell them you don’t feel well and get your things and go home. You’ve been talking to a robot all this time.

           

            You probably saw that one coming, but I wanted to start this off with where things are heading with our technological advances. I think the two best films to compare the situation above to would be Ex Machina and Blade Runner. The thought of a robot being so human that you don’t know it until they’re killing you or leaving you to die because you’ve come to trust them or haven’t trusted them from the start, well it’s kind of scary. I don’t know about you, and I know I’ve said this in one of my previous blogs, but I really don’t want robots to become this lifelike.

            

             In “The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive,” Brian Christian tells us about a test used to identify machines from humans. This test is known as the Turing Test. In the Turing Test, people and computers alike are chosen to answer questions anonymously. Their answers are being judged to see how “human” they are. If the human opponent wins they are deemed “Most Human Human,” and if the computer wins they are the “Most Human Computer.” From chapter two, the best way to differentiate between human and computer (if there are no rules against it) is to ask more personal questions. Page 27 gives a little background as to what I’m talking about. Christian then goes on to say, “This kind of unity or coherence of identity is something that most humans, of course – being the products of a single and continuous life history – have” (pg. 28). Let’s compare this to the tests in Blade Runner and Ex Machina.

           

            In the very beginning of the film Blade Runner, we are given a little bit of detail about the robot figures in this movie, known as “Replicants.” They are robots created to work on other planets to make them survivable for humans. They are very lifelike, but they only live for four years. Six replicants escape back to Earth to find their creator, so that he will give them a longer lifespan. One of the six replicants is captured and asked a series of questions to see whether not they are human or replicant. The questions, or so Detective Holden states, are “meant to provoke an emotional response.” He asks the replicant many different questions, but the one that sets “him” off into a killing frenzy is when the detective asks him to only describe good things that come to mind about his mother. The replicant begins to shoot at the detective and gets away.

  

            Ex Machina is a different take on the Turing Test, meaning the words “Turing Test” are used in the film. A programmer comes to a remote facility to “interview” a robot named Ava. We are aware from the beginning that she is a robot, but when we see her for the first time, it’s difficult to understand her. Her face is very human, but we can see the inner-workings of her head and rest of her body. She is clearly a machine, but that’s not what this test is about finding out. This test is to find out if Ava is aware enough to pass as a human, though it’s clear she’s a machine. I think we can all agree that, yes, she most certainly can pass for a human. Ava manipulates her interviewer into falling for her so she can escape the facility that she’s been locked in since she was created. If that’s not the most human and emotional thing, manipulation that is, then I don’t know what is. In the end, she kills her creator, locks away the interviewer that helped her, and escapes the facility after making herself look human by adding artificial skin and hair to her exposed machinery. In the end, we see Ava standing in the middle of a city watching people walk by. Just watching, like she told her interviewer she wanted to do.

             

            In my opinion, which really doesn’t mean much, I don’t want to see a world where we can’t distinguish between human and robot. Now, who knows, maybe the future won’t be so scary and robots won’t go on a killing rampage. However, people that create these robots can implant these ulterior motives into their processors. They can be created to kill. Like I said in a previous post, these machines could be created to look like anyone and sound like anyone. Who’s to say someone won’t make a “replicant” of me and send them out to kill people, then destroy them or change their appearance so that I would be framed of the crime. I know, I’m just being paranoid. These movies use real people to represent robots, but I really believe that one day, hopefully in the extremely far off future, machines will become so advanced that they will have minds of their own. This means their emotions will be so real no matter what, even a Turing Test won’t be able to tell them apart from humans. We are a society of advancement, anything is possible.