While the 2015 film Ex Machina takes the time to explore the circumspect, deeply iterative AI journey, it also gives us an inventor who single-handedly develops human-like AI and an accompanying humanoid physicality to match - all from the safety of his basement.
#SENTIENCE VS SAPIENCE VS CONSCIOUSNESS SOFTWARE#
And yet Hollywood likes to labor under the impression that not only is the software side of AI readily enough achieved by a single individual, but that the hardware side is just a plug-and-play device away. While the notion of the life-creating mad scientist has been with us since Frankenstein, stitching together a few limbs requires much less technical expertise than building AI. This approach gets around the uncanny valley by taking a humanoid design and piling enough extra cute on top that it’s obvious that the intent isn’t to be truly human. The most successful humanoid robots will necessarily have exaggerated features like those seen in anime. Humans are astonishingly good at spotting things that aren’t quite right, particularly in relation to body language and facial expressions. Even if you can grant that the film was closer to fantasy than to sci-fi (which is what I believe), or is so far in the future that all this has been solved, you really can’t make the same arguments for closer-in films about humanoid robots. Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I. gives us the story of a robotic child, David, who is programmed to be able to “love.” While the film gets some things right, such as David’s adherence to his programming, it misses a big one - the “uncanny valley.” Coined in 1970 by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, the term refers to the negative reaction people have to robots that are too human to look like robots, yet aren’t perfectly human. Is Wall-E the only one that bootstrapped himself into intelligence through some magical process? 3. But there were thousands of these robots, if not millions. Yeah, this seems very nit-picky, and we loved the movie. The area around his docking station would certainly be clean, but it’s unclear how or why he would learn to collect fuzzy objects as a hobby. This is a pretty narrow AI domain from which to develop feelings like love and nostalgia. Wall-E’s transformation begins with its sudden gaining of sentience (and arguably sapience), but from where? Perhaps Wall-E was initially built as an AI so that it could learn to excel at collecting trash. In definitely one of the cuter outings in AI, the eponymous hero of Disney Pixar’s Wall-E takes service bots like the Roomba to a whole new level with its ability to level up its game from trash compactor to environmental activist. Films typically arbitrarily pick a term and run with it, taking a challenging thought problem and using it to do nothing more than get across the idea that a given machine is less/better/scarier/smarter/more than a human. “Intelligence” is even harder to define, particularly when expressed in an artificial environment like the game of Go.
In Hollywood, sentience - the ability to experience subjectively - is typically used equivalently to sapience, the ability to act based on past experience and understanding. These terms are all related but distinct in their own way - except where Hollywood is concerned. These questions form an entire branch of philosophy, asking us to consider the nature of consciousness, intelligence, sentience, and sapience.
Hollywood is keen on “humanlike” intelligence because it makes it possible to skim over one of the deep philosophical roots of AI: defining intelligence and determining whether something exhibits intelligent behavior. Let’s take a look at some of the things that Hollywood gets wrong about AI, and why.
#SENTIENCE VS SAPIENCE VS CONSCIOUSNESS LICENSE#
There’s also a long history of villainous AI, perhaps because those “just a machine” antagonists make human leads seem all the more heroic, or perhaps because science fiction has become increasingly dystopian over time.īut while Hollywood gets some of it right, there’s plenty of artistic license at work. It’s a topic that’s ripe for philosophical discussion, and hard-hitting directors such as Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, and Spike Jonze have all used it as a platform to explore what a world of AI looks like - and what it might mean to live in it.
Why? Because AI gives us a window into our own souls by challenging us to consider what it means to be human, what it means to think, and what our place in the world is. When Hollywood isn’t doing comic book franchises, it’s doing AI.
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