Caleb: If you've created a conscious machine, it's not the history of man.
That's the history of gods.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Ex Machina is a movie about humanities relationship to God.
Nathan: “You know, I wrote down that other line you came up with.
The one about how if I've invented a machine with consciousness, I'm not a man, I'm a God.”
The film’s title is a twist on the Latin term, “Deus Ex Machina” -
God from the Machine - and in that suggests a missing God and a machine
which is no longer machine without him.
Nathan: “Ava. Go back to your room”
Ava: “If I do,
are you ever going to let me out”
I think most people who see Ex Machina are left with the impression that it’s about
the testing of artificial intelligence.
The film follows a programmer named Caleb who wins a week at the isolated home of his billionaire boss,
Nathan, the creator of the worlds most popular search engine.
Nathan has brought Caleb to his home to test his newest creation,
an android named Ava to see if in her he’s created something more than machine.
And the whole of the film is about the test. Nathan: do you know what the Turing Test is?
Caleb: It's when a human interacts with a computer
and if the human doesn't know they're interacting with a computer, the test is passed.
Nathan: And what does a pass tell us? Caleb: So we need to break the ice that the computer has artificial intelligence.
Ava: “Do you want to be my friend?”
Over the next week, in six different sessions, Caleb converses with Ava.
and debriefs in between with Nathan.
Caleb: “Testing Ava through conversation is kind of a closed loop.
Like testing a chess computer by only playing chess.
Nathan: Look, do me a favor. Lay off the textbook approach.
Yesterday I asked you, how you felt about it and you gave me a great answer.
Now the question is how does she feel about you.?”
But the film also alludes to another test.
Ava: “Are you married?”
The name Ava is a variant of the name Eve, the first woman, in the Bible,
whom God created and introduced to Adam after placing him in the garden.
The seven days over which the film takes place eludes to seven days of creation.
And the tree, prominently displayed in Ava’s room represents to the tree of knowledge of good and evil,
through which God tested the man and woman by forbidding them to eat.
Caleb: “Did you give her sexuality as a diversion tactic?
Like a stage magician with a hot assistant?”
Nathan: “So a hot robot who clouds your ability to judge her AI?”
Caleb: “Exactly. So did you program her to flirt with me?”
Ava: “This is what I’d wear on our date.
The glass separating Caleb and Ava also suggests this theme.
Caleb: "when you talk to her your just through the looking glass.”
Here Caleb refers to the Lewis Carroll book in which Alice passes through a mirror
to the strange reverse world on the other side.
Ex Machina is fixated on reflections and the glass dividing the two
also refers to a mirror.
Eva and Caleb are shown mirroring one another which is true of the Bible’s first couple
who have been divided from one another, represented two halves of the same whole.
Ava: “Are you attracted to me?
the reason the sexes desire to be reunited.
So we need to break the ice.
For the record Ava is not pretending to like you.
You’re the first man she’s met that isn’t me.
And I’m like her dad, right?”
The god and father of this creation account is, of course, a caricature of the biblical god.
He’s intelligent and powerful but also narcissistic and abusive,
wearing a wife-beater t-shirt for a good part of the film.
Nathan: “Fuck! Are you fucking kidding me? Did it get on you?
Caleb: No it’s alright. I got it.
Nathan: You’re wasting your time talking to her. She doesn’t understand English. Just give her the napkin.
And it’s Ava who asked Caleb to doubt him
Caleb: Why did you tell me I shouldn’t trust Nathan? Ava: “Because he tells lies”
Lies about what?
Everything.
But there’s something in Nathan’s story which makes Caleb want to believe.
Caleb: Can we talk about the lies you've been spinning me? I didn't win a competition.
I wasn't part of a lottery. I was selected.
Nathan: You know, instead of seeing this as a deception, you should see it as proof.
Caleb: Proof of what? Nathan: Not lucky. Chosen.
Caleb wants to believe Nathan that he’s not just the product of random chance but is special
to Nathan in the same way he believes Ava has been created special.
But the reality is, Ava isn't special to Nathan.
I don’t see Ava’s decision just an evolution.
What will happen to me if I fail the test?
She is the byproduct of this evolutionary process which never had her in mind.
When you make a new model, what do you do with the old one?
Nathan: Well, I Download the mind.
Unpack the data. Add in the new routines I have been writing.
And to do that, you end up partially reformatting, so the memories go. But the body survives.
Do you have people who test you might switch you off? No! I don’t.
But why do I?
And behind the mirrors of Nathan’s closets, Caleb finds the failed skeletons of the creators evolutionary tests.
You feel bad for Ava. Feel bad for yourself, man.
Seeing his reflection in these robot mirrors, Caleb begins to wonder if he too is just an evolved machine
and he dissects his flesh to see if he’s made of meat.
But by now the film has shown that meat is no different than machine.
Nathan: I programmed her to be heterosexual,
just like you were programmed to be heterosexual.
Caleb: Nobody programmed me to be straight.
Nathan: You decided to be straight? Please! Of course you were programmed,
by nature or nurture or both.
The only wall separating Caleb from Ava has been Caleb’s belief in an immaterial spirit
setting humans apart as more than machine, a belief which has now been shattered.
Question 5:
Do you want to be with me?
Caleb, you have to help me.
This is why Caleb rejects and betrays the god in whom he once believed,
I got to say, I am a bit surprised that we never get passed the chess problem as you phrased it.
reprogramming the locks to free Ava and imprison Nathan.
While Ava, at last free, kills Nathan and imprisons Caleb,
leaving him trapped behind the glass of her former prison.
This is Nietzsche’s death of God philosophy, a metaphor for what modern scientific
knowledge has done to Christian belief and the significance it gave human beings.
Nathan’s death represents an end to Caleb’s false belief in his significance -
a loss which now forever traps him in nihilistic despair.
In seeking meaning and wholeness in computers, Caleb has, like those who believe in Christianity,
allowed himself to be manipulated by the unreal.
I have never been outside.
Where would you go if we did go outside?
Maybe a busy pedestrian traffic interception in the city.
This is your hardware and the software?
I am sure you can guess.
Ava is none other than Nathan’s search engine, Bluebook,
the data mined from Caleb’s use of modern technology.
If you knew the trouble I had getting an AI to read and duplicate facial expressions.
Every cell phone just about has a microphone, a camera and a means to transmit data.
So I turned down every microphone and camera across the entire
fucking planet and redirected the data from…
Pretending to like me.
Why would she do that?
Maybe she thought of you as a means of escape.
At the loss of his fantasy, Caleb is forever imprisoned by despair.
What was the real test? You!
Ava was a rat in a mace and I gave her one way out.
To escape she’d have to use self-awareness, imagination,
manipulation, sexuality, empathy and she did,
and now if that isn’t true AI, what the fuck is?
You designed Ava’s face based on my pornography profile.
Hey, if a search engine is good for anything.
Ava, on the other hand, represents those who have only ever derived their significance from the real.
Nietzsche looked forward to this new kind of person, someone more than human.
That’s why she embraces her true identity, clothing herself, like the once naked Eve,
in the flesh of her evolution. But the film never says, Ava is more than a chess computer,
she is significant as that.
Like Alice through the looking glass, she has exchanged places with her reflection,
mirroring the path out by which he entered.
And as with Alice who found herself a pawn in a game of chess having to move the
ight spaces to be transformed into a queen, Ava now stands as queen.
Her shadow in the sunlight representing her overturning of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.