The Dangerous Philosophy Behind Ex Machina (and why it’s more relevant than ever)

Comments · 280

• FI

  @FinalGirlDigital · 1 year ago · pinned

  For more essay content and exclusive videos subscribe to my substack!<br><a href="https://open.substack.com/pub/finalgirldigital?r=1r52c4&amp;utm_medium=ios">https://open.substack.com/pub/finalgirldigital?r=1r52c4&amp;utm_medium=ios</a>

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• MA

  @MatheusMacedo-k6q · 1 year ago

  Anyone who thinks &quot;It&apos;s just a movie&quot; doesn&apos;t realize that those who created phones and tech that changed the world first got the ideas form star trek. Touch screen were in movies before they existed in real life.

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• BA

  @BananaBreadatWorkDudeHellYeah · 1 year ago (edited)

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc6NWieEYvs&amp;t=1202">20:02</a> small note here: neuroplasticity is the quality of neural pathways to be reprogrammed, not the susceptibility to be influenced in early development. The hazard with children is the sheer abundance and rapidity with which an infant/adolescent brain is forming mental/neural associations as it develops. It is largely indiscriminate insofar as the young mind is just responding to the perceptions and experiences it has available to it. Does it have profound, long lasting implications? Absolutely.

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• OR

  @orionnebula1136 · 1 year ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc6NWieEYvs&amp;t=1308">21:48</a> This reminds me of the time I came across a reddit post of someone making the argument that if we were able to create sentient ai, then the ai would basically be slaves. I then scrolled down into the comments only to see dozens of people arguing that we could both create sentient ai AND program them to enjoy being enslaved.

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• TH

  @TheBoringAddress · 1 year ago

  Ah, so about Garland&apos;s thoughts on Easter Island/Rapa Nui on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc6NWieEYvs&amp;t=1642">27:22</a>: He neglects the fact that the wide expanse of Pacific Ocean was mastered, back and forth, by Pacific Islanders for thousands of years... precisely because of their deep knowledge of nature. That&apos;s how they arrived in Rapa Nui in the first place, and how they likely made contact and traded with Pre-Contact American peoples.

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• PL

  @Plasma.Cannibal · 1 year ago

  The way I came RUNNING your videos have always made me so unbelievably happy and I have two of them downloaded so I can watch them whenever I want (The Last Unicorn, and Innocence essays) your videos have scratched my brain in the best way thank you so much for your imagination and creativity

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• SO

  @SorenKays · 1 year ago

  If I can speak to your frustration a little I have a feeling Garland just doesn&apos;t understand what he actually wants to critique. He can critique the aesthetics of capitalism in Silicon Valley but not why these people adopt their aesthetics. This is typical of the bourgeois establishment art that you can critique aesthetics of Capital but still have contradictory views like Sentient AI poses no systemic risks and space exploration is the only way out for Humanity (I was suprised to hear this). Sorry to over politicize the artist but I think its more true than not. Civil War can critique aspects of political polarization (if it even was meant to do that) but not why it actually occurs. If Civil War was about journalism, its hard to talk about journalism without acknowledging what is actually going on in journalism structurally (Chomsky and then algorithms). Warfare can analyze soldiers sacrifice in the Iraq War but not the system of power that put soldiers there in the first place. The fundamental power structure is unchallenged when you just treat outlying aesthetics and not the fundamentals. I have a strong feeling Garland&apos;s understanding of capitalism is greedy rich people in Silicon Valley and New York and not just the system of who owns and who works, which is typical of some filmmakers, since what they do is so entrenched in Capital itself.

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• MI

  @mieschabear · 1 year ago

  The dance scene in this movie is easily the best part 😍

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• DM

  @DMFTexTex · 1 year ago (edited)

  As an engineer who actually studied AI, listening to all these people talk about AI as if it was a human mind makes me makes me feel despair. AI is a machine. No machine will ever do what a human does, because no machine has ever lived what a human lives. You will never have enough sensors to pick up the lived experience of even a single person. So many Small Things, even as much as the different frequencies that your ear can pick up as your age. No machine can even detect smell or touch in enough volume to create an AI model. You train a machine on the data you have and the data we have is very limited. The data we have is gathered through the devices we use, and these devices are already the best of our technological development. Data gathering through this technology is reaching the physical limits of our world, creating a climate catastrophe through the use of what little industrial energy we can create. We do not have enough energy to create a one-to-one simulacra of our world that will feed the machine requirements to create a general AI. Too many of us have fallen into a belief for a magic trick. Our own human imagination has led us into a mass hysteria based on believing &quot;creative&quot; salesmen.This video feeds this despair by giving credence to the idea that simulated consciousness can even come close to real consciousness. This video builds into the cult of AI. Human like robots are an impossibility, and barely even conceiving the possibility that this ideia it&apos;s possible only feeds into the cult of AI. This video is thus self defeating.

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• ZG

  @ZGGuesswho · 1 year ago

  temporarily embarrassed immortals

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• KI

  @kimberlyterasaki4843 · 1 year ago

  Thank you for covering this! I&apos;ve been so baffled that directors/writers who made films like Terminator and ALIEN, which are literally about how AI combined with the military industrial complex and/or inhumane, megacorps could lead to the end of us all, have actually been supportive of AI, even in film. I think this video helped me understand that artists are like any other people and are prone to hypocrisy or at least, can often be charmed by the possibilities of a new technological frontier to the point that they&apos;re blinded to the costs. Especially if AI offers a kind of immortality to these older directors.

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• ME

  @merchantfan · 1 year ago

  I honestly got the opposite moral from Ex Machina considering she manipulates and then kills the main character and demonstrates she might not have human level empathy (taking parts at will from the other androids). Did he say these concepts in interviews then? I did think it was an interesting take on gender though especially how she manipulates him into thinking of her as a damsel in distress by acting stereotypically feminine and meek with the cardigans. And the way Oscar Isaac is trying to find the perfect way to &apos;own&apos; women. Owning a &apos;fem bot&apos; that they can use as a submissive object of a girlfriend is a very common and disturbing fantasy. I do think we need more depictions of AI as confused amoral entities that reflect humanity instead of logical geniuses. The closest I can think of was the ship AI Holly in Red Dwarf after maybe the second season and even that was supposed to have come after a million years

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