“Machine-made consciousness remains one of the great challenges of modern science,” writes Professor Daniel Rockmore in a Huffington Post opinion piece about artificial intelligence (AI) as portrayed in recent movies such as Her and Ex Machina. In the latter, writes Rockmore, the relationship between a young programmer and a robot named Ava reflects the famous “Turing Test,” an experiment, named for the father of AI, Alan Turing, that provides a marker for achieving human intelligence in a machine.
“Ex Machina makes us think about what that might mean,” writes Rockmore, the William H. Neukom 1964 Distinguished Professor of Computational Science. “The title brings to mind the phrase ‘deus ex machina’—the classical dramatic device wherein the (Greek) gods were literally brought out onto the stage to resolve some thorny dramatic problem. God is noticeably absent from the movie. Perhaps that’s a last message from this thought provoking and super smart thriller.”
Read the full opinion piece, published 5/13/15 by the Huffington Post.