Ex Machina and getting over our fears about artificial intelligence

In the new movie Ex Machina, Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, an experienced programmer recruited to test a revolutionary new robot. Her name is Ava, and it's Caleb's job to administer a Turing Test to judge whether the alluring android is actually aware or just a sophisticated bit of code.

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Screenwriter turned director Alex Garland has long been fascinated with the idea of conscious computers since he first played around with simple basic language programmes as a 12-year-old.  

A.I. paranoia

When he first seized upon the idea of Ex Machina, Garland was concerned too many other films were exploring the idea of artificial intelligence. There was Her, Chappie, Transcendance and the upcoming Termaniator Genisys. 

Garland attributes our current fascination with A.I. to the saturation of technology, like tablets and smartphones, in our lives.

"We don't understand how they work but they seem to understand a lot about us," Garland explains.

"They know what we want to buy, and see and they fill in what we're going to write. I think that makes us uneasy and it's reasonable that some of this paranoia [about] A.I. comes from that." 

A parent-child relationship

In the film, Ava is caught in a love triangle of sorts. On the one side,  there's Nathan, Ava's creator, a slick search engine CEO (played by Oscar Issac) who considers his latest creation his property.

On the other side,  there's Caleb, who recognizes Ava as a unique life form that deserves to be free. Garland recognizes that many people see the arrival of true A.I. as a threat that will enslave mankind. But Garland sees self-aware androids as a potential partner.

"I see them as effectively being on a same path as us, because they're a product of us," he says. "There's a kind of parent-child type of relationship that exists there. That doesn't bother me and I would welcome it."

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Garland, who wrote 28 Days Later and Sunshine, believes strong A.I. could find lots of useful roles managing complex systems such as the National Health Service in the United Kingdom.

Ex Machina hits select theatres in Toronto and Vancouver this weekend, before arriving in other Canadian cities next week.