Ex Machina (2014)
This week on Tech Film Noir, we're watching Ex Machina (2014), the AI sci-fi thriller where a programmer wins a week with his billionaire boss and discovers that the company away day is, in fact, a psychological experiment involving a potentially sentient robot, surveillance on an industrial scale, and the world's most uncomfortable disco session.
Join Lianne Potter, Jeff Watkins and Simon Painter as they head into Alex Garland's beautifully sterile billionaire Batcave to work out what the hell Ex Machina is actually trying to tell us. Is Ava conscious? Is she manipulating everyone? Does she deserve human rights? Is Nathan the world's worst boss? And why, if you're building a secret underground lair to develop artificial intelligence, is your access control system apparently held together with a stolen passcard and a prayer?
Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander star in this Oscar-winning sci-fi film about artificial intelligence, human behaviour and the rather awkward question of what happens when your creation starts asking questions about its own existence. It's a film full of philosophical rabbit holes, suspiciously attractive robots, and a tech CEO who makes spending a week with your actual boss sound like a luxury spa break.
Along the way, we get into AI consciousness, robot rights, surveillance capitalism, facial recognition, social engineering, AI training data, cybersecurity, authentication failures and the unsettling ways technology can exploit human psychology. We also investigate the film's surprisingly plausible smart-home technology, its slightly less convincing approach to encryption, some excellent visual effects, and why a man with supposedly world-class security seems perfectly happy to hand out the keys to his entire empire.
Plus: What does your search history say about your ideal woman? And how much of this film is actually about AI, versus one very rich man being an absolute bellend?
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