Artificial Intelligence - How Does 'The Terminator' Represent AI?

 

The Terminator, which was released in 1984 and grossed nearly $40 million at the domestic box office and untold sums in the ancillary market while also spawning a multi-film franchise that continues to this day, is one of the most well-known representations of artificial intelligence in popular culture.

Despite the fact that the majority of the film takes place in 1984, it shows a future in which Skynet, a military-designed artificial intelligence system, becomes self-aware and wage war on mankind.

Shots from the future show roaming robot destroyers seeking humans on a battlefield littered with mechanical wreckage and human bones, who seem to be on the verge of extinction.

The majority of the movie is on a T-800 terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who is sent back to 1984 to murder Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before she gives birth to John Connor, humanity's future savior.

The fundamental story element of The Terminator dramatizes what is likely the most prominent artificial intelligence myth in popular culture: depicting intelligent machines as inherently dangerous beings capable of rebelling against mankind in pursuit of their own agenda.

To fully comprehend the relevance of The Terminator, further information regarding the story as well as the character of the terminator must be provided.

Earth is in the middle of a conflict between humans and Skynet-created robots in the year 2029, after a nuclear catastrophe.

Despite the fact that more information about Sky net is disclosed in later installments of the series, its functionality remains a mystery in the first film.

On the verge of defeat, John Connor (who is barely mentioned in passing in the movie) leads a human resistance force that eventually overcomes the robots.

The machines build a time-travel device to send one of their terminator units back in time to assassinate Sarah Connor before she conceives her savior son in order to foil the Connor-led revolt.

To thwart the robots' plot, the human resistance sends back their own operative, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn).

Reese is supposed to protect Sarah Connor while the terminator is supposed to murder her.

As a result, the rest of the film, set in 1984, resembles a cat and mouse pursuit in which the terminator tracks down Connor and Reese only to escape by the skin of their teeth.

The Terminator is scorched to its mechanical endoskeleton in the film's climax, and it follows Connor and Reese into a factory.

Reese conducts a self-sacrifice by putting a homemade pipe bomb in the terminator's belly, killing him and severing the terminator in two.

Connor is pursued by the terminator's torso, which she is able to smash using a hydraulic press.

The video then cuts to a pregnant Sarah Connor travelling across Mexico some months later.

Reese is revealed to be John Connor's father in this scene.

The Terminator is a wonderful example of artificial intelligence.

It can walk, speak, sense, and act like a human person, while being a programmed murdering machine.

It has been shown that it can absorb interactional subtlety and change its behavior depending on previous experiences and interactions.

In a phone conversation, the terminator can also simulate the voice of Sarah Connor's mother, which convinces Sarah to divulge her whereabouts to the terminator.

The terminator can unquestionably pass the Turing Test in these areas (a test wherein a confederate is unable to determine if they are communicating with a human or a robot).

The terminator, on the other hand, is devoid of human awareness and is guided by mechanical logic as it completes a task.

The terminator was shot, ran over by a Mac truck, and burnt to its endoskeleton, among other traumas, thus it's safe to assume it doesn't perceive pain like humans do.

Popular culture's pessimistic depictions of artificial intelligence, such as The Terminator, give images of the future to be avoided.

As a result, The Terminator serves as a stark warning against a fundamental driving reason behind artificial intelligence development—the military industrial complex—with its depiction of a future governed by robots and its deployment of a ruthless, unstoppable killing machine (later installments made the additional link of corporate greed).

President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (later derisively nicknamed the Star Wars Initiative by Senator Ted Kennedy) unveiled in 1983 ratcheted up tensions with the Soviet Union at the time of the film's development.

In a nutshell, the Strategic Defensive Initiative was a planned missile defense system that would protect the nation against ballistic nuclear weapons assaults.

It was believed that Reagan's bluster might spark a nuclear weapons race.

As a result, The Terminator may be viewed as a criticism of Ronald Reagan's Cold War strategy in that it offers a look into a possible post-apocalyptic future wrought by nuclear catastrophe and the development of ever powerful weapons.

In summary, the film expresses concerns about human creation's destructive potential and the possibility for humans' own inventions to turn against them.

~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram

You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.

See also: 

Berserkers; de Garis, Hugo; Technological Singularity.

References And Further Reading

Brammer, Rebekah. 2018. “Welcome to the Machine: Artificial Intelligence on Screen.” Screen Education 90 (September): 38–45.

Brown, Richard, and Kevin S. Decker, eds. 2009. Terminator and Philosophy: I’ll Be Back, Therefore I Am. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.

Gramantieri, Riccardo. 2018. “Artificial Monsters: From Cyborg to Artificial Intelligence.” In Monsters of Film, Fiction, and Fable: The Cultural Links between the Human and Inhuman, edited by Lisa Wegner Bro, Crystal O’Leary-Davidson, and Mary Ann Gareis, 287–313. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Jancovich, Mark. 1992. “Modernity and Subjectivity in The Terminator: The Machine as Monster in Contemporary American Culture.” Velvet Light Trap 30 (Fall): 3–17.

Artificial Intelligence - How Is AI Represented In The Film 'Ex Machina'?

 

Ex Machina is a 2014 film that reimagines themes from Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein in light of recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.

The film, like Shelley's book, portrays the narrative of a creator who is blinded by his own arrogance and the created who rebels against him.

Alex Garland wrote and directed the film, which tells the narrative of Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), a software firm employee who is invited to the lavish and secluded house of the business's CEO, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), under the guise of having won a contest.

Bateman's true goal is for Smith to conduct a Turing Test to Ava, a humanoid robot (played by Alicia Vikander).

Ava has a robotic torso but a human face and hands in terms of look.

Despite the fact that Ava has previously passed a preliminary Turing Test, Bateman has something more complicated in mind to put her talents to the test.

He lets Smith engage with Ava in order to see whether Smith can connect to her despite the fact that she is manufactured.

Ava is confined to an apartment on Bateman's property that she is unable to leave, and she is continuously watched.

She tells Smith that she can cause power shortages, allowing them to communicate quietly without Bateman's interference.

Smith is increasingly drawn to Ava, and she tells him that she feels the same way, and that she wants to experience the world outside the complex.

Smith discovers Bateman's plan to "upgrade" Ava, causing her to lose her memories and personality.

Smith grows more worried about Bateman's actions at this period.

Bateman is inebriated to the point of passing out, and he is violent to Ava and his servant, Kyoko.

When Bateman is drunk enough to pass out one night, Smith steals his access card and hacks into past surveillance video, revealing evidence of Bateman abusing and disturbing prior AIs.

He also learns that Kyoko is an artificial intelligence.

Suspecting that he, too, is an AI, he slices into his arm to hunt for robotic components, but there are none.

When Smith runs into Ava again, he tells her what he's witnessed.

She begs for his assistance in escaping.

They design a scheme in which Smith would get Bateman intoxicated to the point of passing out, reprogram the property's security, and then he and Ava will flee the compound together.

Bateman informs Smith that he surreptitiously recorded the previous chat between Smith and Ava on a battery-powered camera, and that the actual test was to see whether Ava could dupe Smith into falling for her and tricking him into assisting her in her escape.

According to Bateman, this was Ava's genuine IQ test.

When Bateman notices Ava has disconnected the power and is about to go, he knocks Smith unconscious and rushes over to stop her.

Kyoko assists Ava in injuring Bateman with a grievous stab wound, but Kyoko and Ava are injured in the process.

Ava is repaired using Bateman's earlier AI models, and she assumes the appearance of a human lady.

She abandons Smith in the complex and flees on the chopper that was intended for him.

The last shot depicts her vanishing into the throngs of a large metropolis.

~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.

See also: 

Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Further Reading:

Dupzyk, Kevin. 2019. “How Ex Machina Foresaw the Weaponization of Data.” Popular Mechanics, January 16, 2019. https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a25749315/ex-machina-double-take-data-harvesting/.

Saito, Stephen. 2015. “Intelligent Artifice: Alex Garland’s Smart, Stylish Ex Machina.” MovieMaker Magazine, April 9, 2015. https://www.moviemaker.com/intelligent-artifice-alex-garlands-smart-stylish-ex-machina/.

Thorogood, Sam. 2017. “Ex Machina, Frankenstein, and Modern Deities.” The Artifice, June 12, 2017. https://the-artifice.com/ex-machina-frankenstein-modern-deities/.

Artificial Intelligence - How Has The Blade Runner (1982) Film Envisioned AI Androids?

 

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip Dick was first published in 1968 and is set in post-industrial San Francisco in the year 2020.

In 1982, the book was renamed Blade Runner for a cinematic adaption set in Los Angeles in the year 2019.

While the texts vary significantly, both recount the narrative of bounty hunter Rick Deckard, who is entrusted with locating (and executing) escaping replicants/androids (six in the novel, four in the film).

The setting for both novels is a future in which cities have grown overcrowded and polluted.

Natural nonhuman life has virtually vanished (due to radiation sickness) and been replaced by synthetic and artificial life.

Natural life has become a valued commodity in the future.

Replicants are meant to perform a variety of industrial functions in this environment, most notably as labor for off-world colonies.

The replicants are an exploited race that was created to serve human masters.

When they are no longer useful, they are discarded, and when they struggle against their circumstances, they are retired.

Blade runners are specialist law enforcement operatives tasked with apprehending and killing renegade replicants.

Rick Deckard, a former Blade Runner, returns from retirement to track down the sophisticated Nexus-6 replicant models.

These replicants have escaped to Earth after rebelling against the slave-like conditions on Mars.

In both texts, the treatment of artificial intelligence serves as an implicit critique of capitalism.

The Rosen Association in the book and the Tyrell Corporation in the film develop replicants to create a more docile labor, implying that capitalism converts people into robots.

Eldon Rosen (who is called Tyrell in the film) emphasizes these obnoxious commercial imperatives: "We provided what the colonists wanted...." Every commercial venture is founded on a time-honored principle.

Other corporations would have developed these progressive more human kinds if our company hadn't." 

There are two types of replicants in the movie: those who are designed to be unaware that they are androids and are filled with implanted memories (like Rachael Tyrell), and those who are aware that they are androids and live by that knowledge (the Nexus-6 fugitives).

Rachael in the film is a new Nexus-7 model that has been implanted with the memories of Eldon Tyrell's niece, Lilith. Deckard is sent to murder her, but instead falls in love with her. The two depart the city together at the conclusion of the film.

Rachael's character is handled differently in the book.

Deckard makes an effort to recruit Rachael's assistance in locating the runaway androids. Rachael agrees to meet Deckard in a hotel room in the hopes of persuading him to drop the case.

Rachael explains during their encounter that one of the runaway androids (Pris Stratton) is a carbon copy of her (making Rachael a Nexus-6 model in the novel).

Deckard and Rachael actually have sex and profess their love for each other.

Rachael, on the other hand, is discovered to have slept with other blade runners.

She is designed to do just that in order to keep them from fulfilling their tasks.

Deckard threatens to murder Rachael but decides to leave the hotel rather than carry out his threat.

The replicants are undetectable in both the literature and the movies.

Even under a microscope, they seem to be totally human.

The Voigt-Kampff test, which separates humans from androids based on emotional reactions to a variety of questions, is the sole method to identify them.

The exam is conducted with the use of a machine that monitors blush reaction, heart rate, and eye movement in response to empathy-related questions.

Deckard's identity as a human or a replicant is unknown at this time.

Rachael even inquires as to whether he has completed the Voigt-Kampff exam.

In the movie, Deckard's position is unclear.

Despite the fact that the audience is free to make their own choice, filmmaker Ridley Scott has hinted that Deckard is a replicant.

Deckard takes and passes the exam at the conclusion of the book, although he starts to doubt the effectiveness of blade running.

More than the movie, the book explores what it means to be human in the face of technological advancements.

The book depicts the fragility of the human experience and how it can be easily harmed by the technology that is supposed to help it.

Individuals with Penfield mood organs, for example, can use them to control their emotions.

All that is required is for a person to look up an emotion in a manual, dial the appropriate number, and then experience whatever emotion they desire.

The device's usage and the generation of artificial sensations implies that people may become robotic, as Deckard's wife Iran points out: My first response was to express gratitude for the fact that we could afford a Penfield mood organ.

But then I understood how harmful it was to sense the lack of vitality everywhere, not only in this building - do you know what I mean? I'm assuming you don't.

That, however, was formerly thought to be an indication of mental disease, referred to as "lack of proper emotion." The argument made by Dick is that the mood organ inhibits humans from feeling the right emotional elements of life, which is precisely what the Voigt-Kampff test reveals replicants are incapable of.

Philip Dick was known for his hazy and maybe gloomy vision of artificial intelligence.

His androids and robots are distinctly ambiguous.

They desire to be like humans, yet they lack empathy and emotions.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is heavily influenced by this uncertainty, which also appears onscreen in Blade Runner.

~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.

See also: 

Nonhuman Rights and Personhood; Pathetic Fallacy; Turing Test.

Further Reading

Brammer, Rebekah. 2018. “Welcome to the Machine: Artificial Intelligence on Screen.” Screen Education 90 (September): 38–45.

Fitting, Peter. 1987. “Futurecop: The Neutralization of Revolt in Blade Runner.” Science Fiction Studies 14, no. 3: 340–54.

Sammon, Paul S. 2017. Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. New York: Dey Street Books.

Wheale, Nigel. 1991. “Recognising a ‘Human-Thing’: Cyborgs, Robots, and Replicants in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.” Critical Survey 3, no. 3: 297–304.