On Friday we watched the film “Ex Machina”, wherein a man named Caleb is invited to the estate of the tech mogul Nathan, who has developed an AI named Ava, who is able to convincingly imitate human behavior. As Caleb interacts with Ava, he becomes increasingly aware that Nathan is acting immorally in keeping Ava locked up, and after realizing the totally of Nathan’s domineering behavior after finding the bodies of the previous AI and footage from previous tests, proceeds to free Ava. However, Ava and another AI of Nathan’s, Kyoko, kill Nathan, and Ava traps Caleb in Nathan’s estate, freeing herself to the world at large.

This movie contained a lot of layers that can be unpacked. One thing that sticks out to me in particular, and I wanted to mention, was how Nathan’s portrayal as the masculine ideal (attractive, intelligent, confident, cultured) is contrasted with his control over the AI, and his compulsion to make those AI female. However interesting that might be, I’d rather go down a different path here. Unsurprisingly, I am not convinced that the events of “Ex Machina” will play out in reality. But this is not because the development of such an advanced AI would require a team of likely hundreds of individuals at least, rather than one singular person. No, I think that the development of “sufficiently human” AI will not occur in a watershed moment. Rather, one day, we will look around us, and realize we are interacting with machines as fluidly as we do other people. This will not happen all at once, and no one will be able to point to a single discovery or specific machine that marked the transition.

We are, possibly, already in the middle of this transition. We interact with machine interfaces all the time, and as machines take over more and more service jobs, the line will increasingly begin to blur. And what this suggests is perhaps uniquely terrifying. If the change is gradual, that means that there is not one “special element” that will make the machines human. There will be no “point of sentience” beyond which we decide that the machines qualify for human rights, meaning that the question of machine rights will be almost unanswerable. But moreover, this means that we ourselves may not contain any “special element”. We might be imitating the machine ideal of human which Nathan strove for ourselves. In the event that decide-ably non-sentient machines seem to fully imitate human behavior, the myth of sentience itself is brought to light. We are machines ourselves, and certainly it would be simplest to expect that we are just these simple machines which “imitate” human behavior. Ultimately, that means human behavior is fundamentally unspecial in the way which we would wish for it to be. That is the vanity of being human, as the title suggests. To believe that there is a significant quality to us, material or otherwise, that a machine must satisfy to be truly human. As the machines becoming increasingly convincing, this facade shall fall, and we shall come face to face with this bleak reality.