Which Movie About AI Is The Most Accurate?
7. Ex Machina (Partially Accurate)
A programmer at a huge tech company wins a contest to spend a week with the company’s CEO in his remote facility where he has been developing sophisticated AI androids in secret.
The employee, Caleb, is tasked at giving the AI, known as “Ava,” a series of tests to see if “she” can pass as a real human—quick note here: AI is genderless, but back to the story. The CEO, Nathan, is portrayed as a mad scientist type with a god complex who keeps Ava restricted to her own locked-off portion of the facility.
Ava grows resentful of Nathan and manipulates Caleb into falling in love with her so she can persuade him to help her escape into the real world.
Why It’s Partially Accurate
Ava gets her knowledge from being linked into “BlueBook,” an all-encompassing system, like Google and Facebook combined. This is pretty accurate. What isn’t accurate is Ava’s Artificial General Intelligence. AGI would not be made by one scientist in his Bond-villain cave, presumably dumping a case of energy drinks onto a supercomputer.
When we are ready for AGI, it will take a joint effort of many teams of experts in fields of different types of intelligence to come together to combine everything into one AGI program. Before that can happen, every individual type of intelligence would have to be perfected, and the project itself would be one of the greatest achievements in science history. It would top the likes of the Manhattan Project, the Space Race, and the Large Hadron Collider.
We are decades away from that.
Furthermore, humanlike skin and the ability to move fluidly like Ava and Nathan’s companion robot, Kyoko, are even further away. So if you do get your own robot in this century, don’t expect to be able to dance with it the way Nathan danced with Kyoko.