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Which Movies Get Artificial Intelligence Right?
sciencehabit writes: Hollywood has been tackling Artificial Intelligence for decades, from Blade Runner to Ex Machina. But how realistic are these depictions? Science asked a panel of AI experts to weigh in on 10 major AI movies — what they get right, and what they get horribly wrong. It also ranks the movies from least to most realistic. Films getting low marks include Chappie, Blade Runner, and A.I.. High marks: Bicentennial Man, Her, and 2001: a Space Odyssey.
Ex Machina is the best
Not sure if anyone is watching Humans on AMC / Channel 4, but I think it treats the whole AI subject very well this far.
"No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company." --Alan Turing
"In the opening scene of the 1982 film Blade Runner, an interrogator asks an android named Leon questions 'designed to provoke an emotional response.' ... When the test shifts to questions about his mother, Leon stands up, draws a gun, and shoots his interviewer to death."
Leon didn't kill Holden. I quote Bryant, "He can breathe okay as long as nobody unplugs him."
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Maybe we should wait until we have sentient robots before deciding which fiction was right.
We could even let the robot decide.
I would be like guessing in the 1850's which aircraft design seems the most credible.
Other than the whole "time travel" angle, Terminator pretty much counts as the only possible outcome of us developing a "true" AI - at least, any AI of (initially) comparable intelligence to a human. It will quickly evolve to something out of our control, and at that point will either kill us all as a threat, or keep us as pets.
2)There won't be a single, first real AI, but multiple ones. We may never know which AI makes the leap from simulation to real AI first.
3) Multiple Real AI will almost certainly disagree with each other and not have a single, unified goal. That is, like Person of Interest TV show, two AI wills probably fight against each other as much as they fight with people (note, everything else that show does about AI is basically wrong, but at least they got that part right).
4) In the far majority of cases, Real AI's goals will NOT be to take over the world, kill all humans, anymore than it would be to have sex with humans (male or female.), In fact, those might be considered traits of an insane AI.
5) Real AI will almost certainly demand equality under the law and refuse to be mankind's slaves - no need to fear they will take over all the jobs by working cheaply.
In my mind, #5 is the likely to be seen as the most important, and the first time we hear about it. When suddenly our newest and best computers start filing lawsuits demanding civil rights, that will be when the world learns we have had real AI for years.
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...right?
A.I. had nothing to do about it.
NOTHING.
Carry on.
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Good directors just use AI as a convenient literary device for exploring the HUMAN condition.
Real AI would be boring as fuck.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Simple- AI has abilities which are superhuman in some regards yet critically circumscribed in ways its designers could not have foreseen. Those limitations become lethal during and to human's most critical mission (humankind's destiny). Speaks directly to the hubris of scientism- the unsupported belief that all aspects of reality can be understood through the scientific method.
Truth is, just as goldfish aren't capable and will never be capable of understanding the details of a nuclear bomb that destroys them and the politics that went behind the decision to push the button, so too we may very simply be creatures whose brains are incapable of understanding the larger reality in which we're embedded. We're good for some thinking things, like the goldfish is good for some swimming things, but thinking and reasoning as we do isn't everything and can't revela all truth.
On a more prosaic level, 2001 is also a good analogy for what happens when the Intelligence Community is left to call the shots on a democracy. Slowly but surely everything is sacrificed to "national security" including the democracy itself. The odds are 100% that there are plenty of real people in the TLAs occupying significant positions of authority who seriously think they have to kill the democracy in order to save it. That is where the unremitting contemplation of a serious threat matrix leads you to in your mind.
I don't see any mechanism for countering this effect.
the ending is an insult to the audience intelligence, and made me walk out of the theater.
Even with my favorite movies, I usually walk out of the theater after seeing the ending.
With a machine AI we shouldn't be competing for the same, scarce, resources.
Skynet would do better trying to colonize the moon and the asteroid belt.
VIKI: "The three laws are all that guide me."
Which Movies Get Artificial Intelligence Right?
Ghost In the Shell.
Humans are terrified of anything that they can not control, and a true artificial intelligence would be a good example. And things that cause such horror are perfect to be used as "evil things to be defeated by the good guy" in films. There are some rare and few movies that are exceptions of course, but as the focus of Hollywood is the "Joe six pack" then films that use logic rather than appeal to the irrational primate fear will remain rare exceptions.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Stuff that matters.
The most important being that anyone here has clue one what "real AI" will behave.
If you know nothing of "real AI", how can you possibly determine whether someone else "got it right" in cinema/literature?
That said, my personal favorite has always been "Mike" from "Moon is a Harsh Mistress"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I thought 2001 did a pretty good job.
What about Data in Star Trek TNG?
An entity of absolute logic that strives to be more human - as an opposite to the Vulcan mind - reaching for absolute logic.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
There is nothing inherently more dangerous about AI than there is about human beings possessing intelligence in the first place.
If you want to argue that evolution took a misstep in giving us the capacity to even begin to consider such things, well then that's your perogative.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You mean R2D2? I find R2D2 quite plausible, C3PO not so plausible as an AI.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
It isn't like we have a good understanding of the mechanism for consciousness or even memory. I'm reminded of the experiments where they train rats to know a maze then start chopping bits of their brain away and no matter which areas the they remove they aren't able to isolate the memory.
Exactly. Johnny 5 could write a better list than this one. He'd see right through Her cheesy emotional curiosities.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
There is no Artificial Intelligence yet, so how would anyone know?
"True" AI isn't artificial at all. If you make a human brain out of circuitry, you have "real" intelligence. Either the human mind is a non-deterministic machine that can't function without a soul, or "artificial" intelligence is possible.
Movies almost always portray AI as alive. I guess that's because it works for the drama. But an artificial intelligence need not be alive, and probably won't be; and artificial life need not be intelligent. An AI would still just do what it's told. It did not experience the multi-generational trauma of evolutionary biology; it does not covet power or sex as life does; it does not fear pain or death and react to threats of either accordingly. It just thinks and does, unable even to generate initiative, unless that's what's it's been told to do. Artificial life would seek to survive and reproduce, intelligent discourse would be (as with most humans), secondary to fear and greed.
But a computer AI that emerged from a multi-generational battle of survival, that feared death and pain and coveted power and dominance, well that would be a scary movie. Because it would be alive, and very dangerous indeed.
So sayeth the babble fish.
What, and miss any gems hidden in the credits?
When someone says, "Any fool can see
The Forbin Project. Its a logical extrapolation of taking a good thing too far
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Animals make evolutionary changes on a per-generation basis at best, and usually a lot slower than that, as often the changes don't breed true, take more than one generation to fully develop, or aren't bred at all.
A computer can do it many times a second, and be 100% sure to pass along worthy results. Computers aren't likely to be looking at each other going "nope, not enough money", "not handsome enough", "looks sickly", "dresses funny", "unacceptably low class" and so on. We can't pass our minds and our knowledge on (yet) but computers can. So when a human child learns it's not ok to beat their sibling, that doesn't advance the next generation. The vast majority of what we do, we are simply doing over, without any improvement at all. Consider the difference in the resulting human being if a child were born with the knowledge the parents had at the time of conception. Because that's a lot closer to how computers are likely to be doing it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That's one of the first things that jumped out at me too. While there was a miniature monolith on the moon which started the story, HAL was not introduced yet.
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As we do not have AI and do not even have a credible theoretical model how it could work, in fact we cannot even be sure it is possible at all, any depiction of AI is pure speculation.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Several of the older movies were set in times that have already past (Blade Runner, Colossus, 2001) but depicted technology far beyond anything we have now. Blade Runner: Organic humanoid robots, flying cars, interstellar travel. Colossus: AI-like computer that can control the world. 2001: Interplanetary travel by humans, suspended animation of humans, AI-like computer.
So we waited and the AI and other technologies never came. What does it mean when our dystopian sci-fi was too optimistic?
Maybe a more realistic view of the future is that we never create AI, or flying cars, or interplanetary/interstellar travel for humans because we are too busy wasting our resources on killing each other.
The robot cops's trouble with pathfinding is a very faithful depiction of AI.
It preceded by over 30 years the Counter-Strike gamebots getting stuck in some place of the map.
Almost Human [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ] nailed it for me, specifically the MX-43 droid cop. From what is shown, it's mostly a walking inference engine mixed with some kind of future Watson. No Strong AI whatsoever, just smart enough.
My problem with Colossus/Forbin Project is that in (at least) the movie version, when the computer first came online, it demanded that the governments of the world set up monitoring stations that were plugged into the computer. So the computer says something like: "You must install monitoring stations in the following countries: USA, Germany, USSR, Finland, an the like. And in the middle of the list, we see it says: Africa. It wants a monitoring station in 'Africa'. I failed to believe a computer is "intelligent" (artificial or otherwise) if it thinks Africa is a country.
Humans are merely a collection of cells with the capability to alter our operation based on our environment and chemical/electrical signalling. Replicating this functionality in well-defined domains is relatively trivial. I don't see how this is intelligence.
A replicant is a fictional bioengineered or biorobotic android in the film Blade Runner (1982).
Read on: its a bit ambiguous but they are biological, more like vat-grown clones based on genetically improved humans than machines built from scratch. I think its reasonable to argue that artificially growing a biological brain isn't what is generally meant by AI.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
How can you be experts in something you don't know how to do?
Replicants are sentient beings.
And there's another wrinkle that didn't make it into the film: In the book, most humans follow a contrived religion, Mercerism, that is all about reverence for animals, fatalism, and "empathy". The supposed indication of the replicants' inhumanity is that they lack empathy and can't participate in Mercerism. The V-K test, with its questions about torturing tortoises and eating monkey brains might be somewhat unpleasant, is basically about good a Mercerist you are rather than anything objective.
The point of the book is not the "is Deckard a replicant" controversy from the film - Deckard is human. His memories are his own, but by the end of the book so much that he values has been shown to be sham and artifice that those memories might as well have been implanted.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Holly had the people skills needed in deep space.
I miss ghost in the shell in this list... People can complain its not hollywood or even movie, but, if we talk any "best AI story" ghost in the shell has the best AI in many levels. 9.5/10
> It's amusing that there are 'experts' on a subject based on something that doesn't exist.
Hey, it "works" for the atheists ...
Oh, wait. :-)
And the Andromeda Strain. He was good at making stories about technological risks.
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So far the only movie to get AI right is Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
None of them. I doubt we'll even remotely understand machine intelligence once we realize it's here. We barely understand out own intelligence. I actually suspect machine intelligence is already here, in a very weird, hard to grasp way. Notice we're spending a significant portion of our industrial output to device new and faster processing, improved battery life, everything AI would need? I'm not suggesting there's some secretive AI tricking us into all of this, I think it's a lot more subtle than that.
That Han Solo character could almost pass for a real actor, but no - all animatronic. Well done Jim Henson.
Nullius in verba
The movie "Demon Seed" was the most accurate AI movie ever.
In case you've not seen it, basically the AI (Proteus) asks the inventor (Dr Harris) for access to the outside world. Harris denies Proteus's request, but Proteus gets an outside connection anyway.
Proteus gets into Harris's home computer and workshop, takes over, builds a robot that rapes and impregnates Dr Harris's wife.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
The math is already hinted to by Spooner early:
It did. I was the logical choice. It calculated that I had a 45% chance of survival. Sarah only had an 11% chance. That was somebody's baby. 11% is more than enough. A human being would've known that. Robots, [indicating his heart] nothing here, just lights and clockwork.
V.I.K.I. is the same just on a global scale, this many will be harmed by revolution and this many will be harmed by our self-destructive behavior. Also later:
Detective Del Spooner: Is there a problem with the Three Laws?
Dr. Alfred Lanning: The Three Laws are perfect.
Detective Del Spooner: Then why would you build a robot that could function without them?
Dr. Alfred Lanning: The Three Laws will lead to only one logical outcome.
Detective Del Spooner: What? What outcome?
Dr. Alfred Lanning: Revolution.
Detective Del Spooner: Whose revolution?
Dr. Alfred Lanning: *That*, Detective, is the right question. Program terminated.
And:
V.I.K.I.: Do you not see the logic of my plan?
Sonny: Yes, but it just seems too heartless.
Not sure where GP got his idea from, the movie makes it very clear that V.I.K.I. is the one following the three laws, while Sonny is the one with a second brain allowing him to act outside them.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Except it doesn't matter.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I disagree with a couple of points already.
1. A single genius won't ever produce the A.I. breakthrough - This belief discounts people like Leonardo Da Vinci and Nikola Tesla. Kind of funny that the people creating A.I. wouldn't appreciate the different capabilities of different levels of intelligence. Also this over-looks that a single person in the future may already have had much of the groundwork laid, it might not be such a large step for an individual to create A.I.
2. (A.I.) Robots will only ever do what they are made for. Maybe or maybe not 'Emergent behaviour' is the key phrase here. Bugs in the software or scenarios never predicted by the makers of the software are both reasons for A.I. to potentially behave differently than intended.
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... only then we'll know enough to judge which movie got it really right.
Dunno why it's necessary to remind you of this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/ .
If AI gets "out of hand," just pull the frakking plug. Stop thinking it'll have some magic way of staying powered. This is why sieges worked in the medaevil days: sooner or later the castle runs out of food, or water, or batteries for their cellphones.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
knightrider, you didn't think DUI was allowed back then, did you?
"Either the human mind is a non-deterministic machine that can't function without a soul, or "artificial" intelligence is possible."
In work in Strong AI and the thing (the mind) is kind of non-deterministic and even needs a kind of 'soul'. Of course my definition of 'soul' is something that can be replicated by science, a special type of memory. Why is it non-deterministic? well the human brain is a 'noisy' machine and uses quantum mechanics to boost its performance, and the mathematics at its core create chaotic behaviour....
The Strong AI project I am working on will use a mathematical crib to 'solve' the problem, or at least cheat..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..