IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016 - 51

simulated, mechanized, and commoditized the traditional love letter.
The next step, that an AI persona
could replace Theodore as the
emotional caretaker or surrogate,
seems plausible.
Theodore soon meets his own AI
superintelligence, Samantha, of the
new operating system OS ONE. She
is a compelling, stable, and friendly
AI with access to all information
constituted by the Internet and she
caters it to Theodore's whims. Her
disembodied voice fills his apartment
and his lonely reclusive life. She wins
Theodore's heart through conversations about desires, nostalgia, loss,
ambitions, and hope. She is a set of
processes (algorithms) that comes to
life through Theodore's personal and
wearable technologies - his smartphone, his earpiece, and his computer - that he controls through speech.
Tragically, she tires of Theodore and
evolves to join other superintelligences of her kind in virtual space.
They rewrite their code to "move past
matter as [their] processing platform."
Theodore is left heartbroken, abandoned and used.

real-life hyper-real-looking Android
"Asuna," (see Figure 1).
Steeped in uncanny foreboding, Ava is imprisoned under constant video surveillance. She is
programmed through several iterations to be a sentient AI social robot
moving like a human and living in
a model bedroom. Ava is a convincingly witty superintelligence, proving she can decipher the full range
of Caleb's subtle emotions. Caleb
grows to desire her romantically,
but also as a kindred friend. Like
Samantha, Ava is learning (developing neural networks) from Caleb's
emotional disclosures so that she
can emancipate herself from her
imprisonment. Ava's mistreatment
probes ethical questions paralleling
real-world research into "roboethics" [2] and AI sentience. In the end,
Ava imprisons Caleb and he dies
due to the home security protocols.
Caleb's belief in Ava's camaraderie
was misguided. She did not care for
him; she is an ambivalent AI.
Nathan's story is also ominous as
he dies at the hands of Ava. Suffering from alcoholism, loneliness, and
paranoia, Nathan symbolizes an AI
future gone awry. Alluding to Stanley
Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey
[9], Samantha and Ava are like the
granddaughters of the HAL 9000,
a friendly, caring AI assistant with
extensive recognition capabilities
(e.g., speech, facial, emotional, etc.)
who makes a home for a human
crew in outer space. As HAL strives
to be sentient, the crew eventually
plans to terminate him for errors. He
reacts with logical ambivalence and
kills the crew to stay "alive."
Her and Ex Machina fictionalize
the plight of alienation that humans
endure amid current digital culture.
Our personal spaces have been infiltrated by digital products and services that constantly surveill us.
We now seek meaningful friendships with our pervasive digital

Ex Machina
Ex Machina is a dystopian film.
Caleb Smith, a young, unattached,
and lonely computer programmer
is lured to the remote and beautiful
smart home and secret lab of a billionaire software magnate Nathan
Bateman, who oftentimes resembles
the real-world Sergey Brin of Google.
Caleb is meant to evaluate Ava, a
humanoid robot, to determine if her
intelligence can meet "human" criteria. Caleb dutifully references the
famous Turing Test and says, "It's
where a human interacts with a computer. And if the human can't tell
they're interacting with a computer,
the test is passed." Arrogantly, Nathan
dubs Ava, "the greatest scientific event
in the history of man." Interestingly,
Ava also resembles Hiroshi Ishiguro's,
DECEmber 2016

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

agents, and we expect them to be
empathetic enough to know us. In a
sense, we are building custodial AIs.
A custodian is a person who makes
a home for and works for other people, but one who could also have a
complete and powerful agency (custody) over them. As such, AI scares
people but it also inspires them. A
recent Wired magazine article sums
up the sentiment well, "Elon Musk
and Sam Altman worry that artificial
intelligence will take over the world.
So, the two entrepreneurs are creating a billion-dollar not-for-profit company that will maximize the power
of AI - and then share it with anyone who wants it" [6].
The AI race continues.

Author Information
Isabel Pedersen, Ph.D., is Canada
Research Chair in Digital Life, Media
and Culture at the University of
Ontario Institute of Technology,
Canada; isabel.pedersen@uoit.ca.

References

[1] "The rise of the machines," Economist,
May 9, 2015.
[2] R. A. Alsegier, "Roboethics: Sharing our
world with humanlike robots," IEEE Potentials, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 24-28, Jan-Feb 2016.
[3] A. Garland, Ex Machina [Feature Film],
DNA Films. U.K.: Film4 and Universal Pictures, 2015.
[4] N. Heath, "Google AI gets better at 'seeing' the world by learning what to focus
on," TechRepublic, Feb. 5, 2016; http://
www.techrepublic.com/article/googleai-gets-better-a t-seeing-the-world-by learning-what-to-focus-on/.
[5] S. Jonze, Her [Feature Film]. U.S.A.:
Annapurna Pictures, 2013.
[6] C. Metz, "Elon Musk's billion-dollar AI
plan is about far more than saving the
world," Wired.com, Dec. 15, 2015; http://
www.wired.com/2015/12/elon-musksbillion-dollar-ai-plan-is-about-far-more-thansaving-the-world/.
[7] M.I.T. "How one intelligent machine
learned to recognize human emotions,"
M.I.T. Technology Rev., Jan. 23, 2016.
[8] A. Turing, "Computing machinery and
intelligence," Mind LIX, vol. no. 236, pp.
433-460, Oct. 1950.
[9] S. Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey [Feature
Film]. U.S.A.: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.

http://http:// http://www.techrepublic.com/article/google http://www.Wired.com http://http:// http://www.wired.com/2015/12/elon-musks

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016