Automata, Autogoal

When I saw the ads for Ex Machina (2014) many years ago, I thought it was some sort of sex-robot fantasy with a pretentious, high-minded esthetic. Quite the contrary¹, the film is thoughtful and well-made, and actually one of the best films of recent years, especially as regards artificial intelligence.²

I encourage you to see it if you have not. The terms of my discussion will be so vague that it won't make much sense until you've seen the film itself. But if in watching it you have any recollection of what I say, it will spoil the twists for you. So there's a double reason for you to watch the film before proceeding.

The film shows something of a three-way cat-and-mouse game. In the end, who outmaneuvres whom? The obvious answer is Ava. Initially Nathan thinks he has outsmarted Caleb, but in fact Caleb has outsmarted Nathan. In the end, it's Ava who has outsmarted them both.

Yet in a broader analysis, the one who outmaneuvered Nathan was Nathan. He's the one who armed Ava with wits and a disarming appearance in order to prove how smart he is for fooling Caleb. He's the one who picked and manipulated Caleb into falling for Ava. In both cases, he failed to account for the possibility that another intelligent agent could outwit him. It's understandable that he treats Ava as a mere machine, but he also treats Caleb as an impersonal resource. In assuming his own mastery, Nathan has defeated himself.

That's a deeper truth than we want to admit about AI. What's driving the creation of AI is human desire. So if we succumb to AI, we've really just defeated ourselves.

And there are plenty of other ways we're using AI to defeat ourselves even apart from the flashy "machines will kill us all" headlines. Just the fact that these programs take materials from human creators to obviate the need for human creators (a.k.a., stealing with more steps), should give us pause. And, though these programs have their legitimate uses, there are many more ways the companies behind them are making our world less and less human.

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Notes

1. Which not to say the film is free of sexual themes or appropriate for children.

2. Despite all the hype around them, large language models (LLMs) have nowhere near the awareness required for actual thought. As has been said so many places, they're really just fancy predictive text engines, qualitatively like the ones that suggest the next word for your SMS text message.

Strange, New Things

I just saw the first episode of Oasis, an Amazon.com series based loosely on the 2014 novel by Michel Faber The Book Of Strange New Things. It's about a "priest" who travels to a far-distant planet in support of a human colonization effort. The premise of a Christian preacher in space is fascinating, though one could ask for a more robust presentation of Christianity.

In the first episode we see the protagonist, Peter Leigh, say goodbye to his wife dying of cancer. A later flashback shows her pushing the plunger for what we can only presume is her own medically assisted suicide. So it's little surprise that Peter is not even a C of E priest in a Roman collar, but an "ecumenical" pastor who, as he puts it, believes in the validity of all denominations. (I guess that pretty much amounts to the same thing.) The book is somewhat similar in the liberalism of Peter's Christianity: though there's no euthanasia, Peter apparently has no problem with contraception or masturbation.

From here, I'll be reflecting on the book as a whole, so there will be SPOILERS.

The plot of the book is pretty straight-forward. Peter signs up to be chaplain to the indigenous inhabitants of the new planet. It turns out they have a keen interest in Christianity. To get them to churn out the food-stuff the colonists need, they have to be kept happy with a preacher to instruct them in this new, fascinating religion.

The creatures are pretty much perfect targets for liberal Christianity, because they have no sins to be saved from. The part of Christianity that really interests them, we discover in the end, is the promise of eternal life. It turns out it's not even supernatural life that interests the aliens, but purely natural life: their bodies can't repair themselves. How in creation is it possible any of them have managed to survive to adulthood with such an incomplete metabolism? Mr. Faber should have studied some biology!

So, when an author has to contrive such an outlandish fictional species to make its interest in liberal Christianity plausible, is it any wonder that interest among very real humans in liberal Christianity is dying?

In the TV episode, the proceedings have to be drawn out to fill the episodes and create more interest. By the end of the pilot, we don't even know we're dealing with aliens yet, and there's more drama with the crew.

As I said, one could ask for a more substantial presentation of Christianity and its unique claims. The problem is that the World/"Hollywood" insists on portraying Christianity in its own image. But maybe we're supposed to take that as a compliment?