Throughout the movie, I found myself having a lot of compassion towards Ava. I was rooting for her and Caleb. I had to remind myself that she wasn’t a human, but she wasn’t a robot either. She was so much more than that. She was artificial intelligence. Nonetheless, I had sympathy for a machine, even when her inner workings were visible. The twist at the end was very unexpected. How could she just leave Caleb there? Was she programmed to manipulate him or was that her decision? Who was in control? As she was going from closet to closet putting herself “together”, it made me wonder if an AI were walking down the street, would we even realize it?
The movie really made me think about the future for AI and what it means for our society. People are turning over everyday tasks to machines without necessarily realizing it. In The Atlantic article, Adrienne LaFrance explains, “People who are between 20 and 35, basically they’re surrounded by a soup of algorithms telling them everything from where to get Korean barbecue to who to date.” Are we even in control of our own lives if a machine is always telling us what to do? John Markoff said, “That’s a very subtle form of shifting control. It’s sort of soft fascism in a way, all watched over by these machines of loving grace. Why should we trust them to work in our interest? Are they working in our interest? No one thinks about that.” A quote from Nathan really stuck out to me. He said, “One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons.” With unbelievable advances in technology, could this be possible?
JillianBerardi 