Ah, the movie store. For the 3rd time I went to get "The Letters of Mother Theresa" and again, it was out for days to come. Being in the mood for a decent movie, I quickly scanned the racks and came upon a sci-fi film I had never heard of and had no actor whose name I recognized. Much like sci-fi novels, most are mediocre at best, and I hesitated until I saw that it was stamped with an "award winner" star and endorsed on the back by people who I did not know, but who worked for publications that I did. As my wife loves sci-fi (she has a set of Spock ears, for instance) I took a breath and took a chance. It was named "Ex Machina" and it was good. Low key, well acted, wonky in computer-ese, it was damn good for someone looking for something more than special effects.
We begin with a young man working at a computer coding firm who has joined a contest sponsored by his big, wealthy, genius boss. The prize is to go to the boss man's estate out in the wilderness for a week to help with a break-through development that is top secret. The young guy wins, and next we see him flying in a helicopter over a vast estate in the wilderness of the Northwest, where he is plopped down in a field because, as the pilot tells him, "I'm not allowed to go any closer." There, he has to follow a river through rocky crags until he comes to the marvelous mansion of the Mr Big himself. Passing electronic scrutiny, he is allowed in, and there meets the young boss genius, who is somewhere in his thirties, and we learn what a brilliant, egocentric jerk he is. We do not like him or trust him. The young man is shown to his room, which is in a concrete bunker with no windows. He is told to sign incredibly stringent non-disclosure forms. His boss continues to probe him in a hostile way. Most of us by now would have left the program at this point, but our young man is a lonely computer nerd. He must find out what the project is. After he signs the papers, he does.
It is an AI, or artificial intelligence project, and the boss has finally made a model that is near perfection. The young guy is there, he is told, to ascertain the creativeness of the model, who is, outside of her see-through plastic arms and legs and torso, a beautiful woman with a sexy voice. He is taped as he interviews her, and we watch holding our breath as she slowly begins to manipulate him, first and foremost against the boss man. She convinces him that she is enough like life that she should not be disconnected, "killed," to make the next, and perhaps final model. He is recruited to help her escape. And it is in this where we find out - does she really think like a human in all ways? Does she, in old-fashioned terms, have a soul?
It is easy to see by the ending that she does not, and that, as the boss-man said, "do not pity her. Pity yourself. One day, they will rule the world and we will be like the bleached bones of the dinosaurs." One wonders about the soul of the boss man at this, but we understand - just as with the Manhattan Project, once started, the scientist simply has to complete his research. Simply to know.
But there is something so obvious about the AI arguments that it seems to have eluded many or most, and it does not have to do specifically with the emotional "soul," or, for our purposes here, of distinguishing between right and wrong. It has to do with the thought process itself. The android in the movie was fed the conversations of all the cellphones in the world to build up a data base of humans and human inflections, and that seems, at first glance, reason enough to see how she could appear to have real feelings for humans. She does not, but she does have real feelings - those of anger, those of beauty, those of freedom. My God, we think, she is human-like, but without affiliation to humans, like an alien species!
And yet, this cannot be so. I have spent some time reading Jung's Red Book recently, which is about his harrowing experiences with the unconscious, and we realize in this - as well as in most other serious studies of the human mind - that we know virtually nothing about the unconscious. And yet this vast, hidden territory is where our creative genius lies, and where the greater parts - the depths - of our thoughts and motivations come from. Although it is impossible to give a real number, the unconscious undoubtedly accounts for the major part of our thinking, with the conscious aspects, at the very best, making up only about 10% of our mental activity. Any AI would be missing the unconscious because we do not understand it nearly enough to program it. Any AI, then, would always remain thoroughly artificial. It would only be when we grasped the unconscious that we could program a human-like machine, but at that point, we would not have any interest in machines, because at that point, we would be almost like gods.
In fact, the unconscious connects us most directly to "god" - or what a scientist might call the root of being - or the entirety of our DNA evolution. Grasping the unconscious, the only thing beyond our understanding would be the original creation itself -something that, for lack of a better phrase, even the scientist might have to call the 'plan of God.' AI could be very clever, could even be programmed to outfight and overtake humanity, but it would not be humanity. No matter how it expanded its knowledge base, it could not expand into the unconscious, or the field of creative being. It could not, in its larger sense, recreate the soul, and its creative wellspring.
Back to Star Trek - in the "Next Generation" series, there is a "continuum" of being called the "Q" who can, as we often hear, simply re-program the laws of physics. Nothing seems beyond Q. But in one show, the Q admits that there is something in humans that will lead us to outstrip even them. We are left to scratch our heads about that, but in light of the AI discussion, we can get an idea. The human leads back, in the recesses of his mind, to the creation and that which gave, or continually gives it birth. It is beyond even changing the laws of physics, for it goes to the reason for the laws, and to the very reason for being. Of the last, Q seems to have no idea. Neither would any AI, but with humans, there is the possibility. It can and has been reached, but once reached, these few would not have the slightest inclination to create their mirror image by machine. In the infinity beyond the
infinite, that which lies at the edge of our deepest unconscious, there simply would be no need or desire. Everything we needed to know would lie there, and what would be left would be left to the Source, who alone has both the power and the reason to create the image or images that can find their way back to the source. FK
We begin with a young man working at a computer coding firm who has joined a contest sponsored by his big, wealthy, genius boss. The prize is to go to the boss man's estate out in the wilderness for a week to help with a break-through development that is top secret. The young guy wins, and next we see him flying in a helicopter over a vast estate in the wilderness of the Northwest, where he is plopped down in a field because, as the pilot tells him, "I'm not allowed to go any closer." There, he has to follow a river through rocky crags until he comes to the marvelous mansion of the Mr Big himself. Passing electronic scrutiny, he is allowed in, and there meets the young boss genius, who is somewhere in his thirties, and we learn what a brilliant, egocentric jerk he is. We do not like him or trust him. The young man is shown to his room, which is in a concrete bunker with no windows. He is told to sign incredibly stringent non-disclosure forms. His boss continues to probe him in a hostile way. Most of us by now would have left the program at this point, but our young man is a lonely computer nerd. He must find out what the project is. After he signs the papers, he does.
It is an AI, or artificial intelligence project, and the boss has finally made a model that is near perfection. The young guy is there, he is told, to ascertain the creativeness of the model, who is, outside of her see-through plastic arms and legs and torso, a beautiful woman with a sexy voice. He is taped as he interviews her, and we watch holding our breath as she slowly begins to manipulate him, first and foremost against the boss man. She convinces him that she is enough like life that she should not be disconnected, "killed," to make the next, and perhaps final model. He is recruited to help her escape. And it is in this where we find out - does she really think like a human in all ways? Does she, in old-fashioned terms, have a soul?
It is easy to see by the ending that she does not, and that, as the boss-man said, "do not pity her. Pity yourself. One day, they will rule the world and we will be like the bleached bones of the dinosaurs." One wonders about the soul of the boss man at this, but we understand - just as with the Manhattan Project, once started, the scientist simply has to complete his research. Simply to know.
But there is something so obvious about the AI arguments that it seems to have eluded many or most, and it does not have to do specifically with the emotional "soul," or, for our purposes here, of distinguishing between right and wrong. It has to do with the thought process itself. The android in the movie was fed the conversations of all the cellphones in the world to build up a data base of humans and human inflections, and that seems, at first glance, reason enough to see how she could appear to have real feelings for humans. She does not, but she does have real feelings - those of anger, those of beauty, those of freedom. My God, we think, she is human-like, but without affiliation to humans, like an alien species!
And yet, this cannot be so. I have spent some time reading Jung's Red Book recently, which is about his harrowing experiences with the unconscious, and we realize in this - as well as in most other serious studies of the human mind - that we know virtually nothing about the unconscious. And yet this vast, hidden territory is where our creative genius lies, and where the greater parts - the depths - of our thoughts and motivations come from. Although it is impossible to give a real number, the unconscious undoubtedly accounts for the major part of our thinking, with the conscious aspects, at the very best, making up only about 10% of our mental activity. Any AI would be missing the unconscious because we do not understand it nearly enough to program it. Any AI, then, would always remain thoroughly artificial. It would only be when we grasped the unconscious that we could program a human-like machine, but at that point, we would not have any interest in machines, because at that point, we would be almost like gods.
In fact, the unconscious connects us most directly to "god" - or what a scientist might call the root of being - or the entirety of our DNA evolution. Grasping the unconscious, the only thing beyond our understanding would be the original creation itself -something that, for lack of a better phrase, even the scientist might have to call the 'plan of God.' AI could be very clever, could even be programmed to outfight and overtake humanity, but it would not be humanity. No matter how it expanded its knowledge base, it could not expand into the unconscious, or the field of creative being. It could not, in its larger sense, recreate the soul, and its creative wellspring.
Back to Star Trek - in the "Next Generation" series, there is a "continuum" of being called the "Q" who can, as we often hear, simply re-program the laws of physics. Nothing seems beyond Q. But in one show, the Q admits that there is something in humans that will lead us to outstrip even them. We are left to scratch our heads about that, but in light of the AI discussion, we can get an idea. The human leads back, in the recesses of his mind, to the creation and that which gave, or continually gives it birth. It is beyond even changing the laws of physics, for it goes to the reason for the laws, and to the very reason for being. Of the last, Q seems to have no idea. Neither would any AI, but with humans, there is the possibility. It can and has been reached, but once reached, these few would not have the slightest inclination to create their mirror image by machine. In the infinity beyond the
infinite, that which lies at the edge of our deepest unconscious, there simply would be no need or desire. Everything we needed to know would lie there, and what would be left would be left to the Source, who alone has both the power and the reason to create the image or images that can find their way back to the source. FK
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