“Hey Terminator, what’s the weather today?”

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“Hey, Siri!”, “Ok, Google” and “Alexa, I am sad, play Despacito” These expressions are very common in today’s time. We have been treating these technological advancements as real human beings. We talk to them and as I saw during my Thanksgiving break, teach kids to be polite to them. Ex Machina takes this symbiosis of technology and humans to the next, a much gloomier level. In addition to that, the movie also raised questions on the interpretability of the algorithms we design, Ava did whatever to attain a certain goal, even deceiving David in doing so. This makes the question of how an algorithm does it what it does and why it does so a more important question.

4 thoughts on ““Hey Terminator, what’s the weather today?””

  1. Your title speaks to a really mind blowing trend in the public consumption of tech products, I think. We have all these incredibly advanced devices around us, the results of hundreds of years of scientific and technological pursuit. Yet we often use them for the most inconsequential things: funny videos, memes, etc.

  2. Slightly off topic, but your title made me think: I feel like the Terminator wouldn’t know what the weather is — he seems really cool and must be able to do extremely fast computations in order to interact with the real world, but he doesn’t seem like an all-knowing being like Siri. They embody two different sectors of data technology: technology focused on having and accessing data (as Siri does), and technology focused on quickly collecting and analyzing data (as the Terminator and Ava do). Nowadays, we always seem more interested in technology like Terminator and Ava, whereas technology like Siri seems like a given. Does that mean technology like Siri is as good as we need it to be for now?

  3. The entire concept of artificial intelligence involves multiple questions that humanity still does not have all the answers to. That is why there is always a big risk associated with the advancement of technology. For instance, if something very sophisticated falls into the wrong hands, it could cause some major issues in the society.

  4. I’ve never seen Ex Machina, but your description makes it sound very similar to Black Mirror. Last year for a Friday FIlm we watched a Black Mirror episode, and I felt the same way. Maybe technology is headed is a more dreary direction than it is useful