Alicia Vikander as the AI Ava in the forthcoming film Ex Machina. Photograph: Film4/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Blade Runner and RoboCop to The Matrix, how humans deal with the artifical intelligence they have created has proved a fertile dystopian territory for film-makers. More recently Spike Jonzes Her and Alex Garlands forthcoming Ex Machina explore what it might be like to have AI creations living among us and, as Alan Turings famous test foregrounded, how tricky it might be to tell the flesh and blood from the chips and code.
These concerns are even troubling some of Silicon Valleys biggest names: last month Telsas Elon Musk described AI as mankinds biggest existential threat we need to be very careful. What many of us dont realise is that AI isnt some far-off technology that only exists in film-makers imaginations and computer scientists labs. Many of our smartphones employ rudimentary AI techniques to translate languages or answer our queries, while video games employ AI to generate complex, ever-changing gaming scenarios. And so long as Silicon Valley companies such as Google and Facebook continue to acquire AI firms and hire AI experts, AIs IQ will continue to rise
Isnt AI a Steven Spielberg movie? No arguments there, but the term, which stands for artificial intelligence, has a more storied history than Spielberg and Kubricks 2001 film. The concept of artificial intelligence goes back to the birth of computing: in 1950, just 14 years after defining the concept of a general-purpose computer, Alan Turing asked Can machines think?
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Its something that is still at the front of our minds 64 years later, most recently becoming the core of Alex Garlands new film, Ex Machina, which sees a young man asked to assess the humanity of a beautiful android. The concept is not a million miles removed from that set out in Turings 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he laid out a proposal for the imitation game what we now know as the Turing test. Hook a computer up to text terminal and let it have conversations with a human interrogator, while a real person does the same. The heart of the test is whether, when you ask the interrogator to guess which is the human, the interrogator [will] decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman.
Turing said that asking whether machines could pass the imitation game is more useful than the vague and philosophically unclear question of whether or not they think. The original question I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nonetheless, he thought that by the year 2000, the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
In terms of natural language, he wasnt far off. Today, it is not uncommon to hear people talking about their computers being confused, or taking a long time to do something because theyre thinking about it. But even if we are stricter about what counts as a thinking machine, its closer to reality than many people think.
So AI exists already? It depends. We are still nowhere near to passing Turings imitation game, despite reports to the contrary. In June, a chatbot called Eugene Goostman successfully fooled a third of judges in a mock Turing test held in London into thinking it was human. But rather than being able to think, Eugene relied on a clever gimmick and a host of tricks. By pretending to be a 13-year-old boy who spoke English as a second language, the machine explained away its many incoherencies, and with a smattering of crude humour and offensive remarks, managed to redirect the conversation when unable to give a straight answer.
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Artificial intelligence: how clever do we want our machines to be?
