Sunday, April 24, 2016
Who is the real one in control? The man or the machine?
Shortly after watching both Ex Machina and Creative Control by Alex Garland and Benjamin Dickinson, I noticed the plight, or rather downfall of the human expression. Right off the bat, both films are centered on a human trying to make sense out of the artificial intelligence that they have created. It's almost like we see a downfall of the protagonist throughout the film. For ex_machina, we see Nathan using Ava to try to pass the Turing test to see if she could be passed a legitimate human being, and in Creative Control, David uses his faux-Google Glass product to try to have an affair with Juliette. However, I think that these two films are trying to get at something. In the near future, how far are we going to take technology? At what point can we draw the line? These innovations and improvements are a detriment to future societies, and now that the technology is accessible, we are using it for harm instead of good. Or at least I think that's what both films are trying to say.
Over all of the abundant examples of using technology to help people, from prosthetics to improving education, our society never seems to look at the examples of harmful use until it is presented in the news. For example, we never really mention drones or spying unless it makes breaking news. Maybe they are understated in these films to prove a point. What I am trying to get at is that both films are trying to connect the detriment of technology towards a specific person as the root cause for society's collapse due to our fixation and "addiction" of consuming technology. How do we know that Nathan was trying to let Ava escape and pass the Turing test so that Ava could commit genocide or something of that nature? How do we know that David's manipulation of Sophie through the glasses was on purpose or something that he accidentally discovered? The answers are not very clear...
So now I think the question is who is really in control? The man or the cell phone? The man or the robot? The man or the machine? Will Ava become the norm in 10, 20 years? Possibly, I am not ruling it out. But I do believe that there is a mass conspiracy where the technology of today is going to be so advanced that the robots will coexist with humans and we will have no way of knowing. But who is responsible for this? We all are. And there's no stopping them.
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So our days are numbered, eh? Your post takes me all the way back to Kubrick's 2001. That film gets at some of the biggest questions posited by the genre. It begins at the "Dawn of Man" which coincides basically with the dawn of technology (bone used as weapon). It ends with some sort of rebirth of man. In between, we see man and machine co-existing pretty well. The curious thing is that the machines, like Hal, seem to have more emotion than the humans. It's interesting that for Kubric, the real problem with man's relationship with machine has nothing to do not being able to tell them part, but rather our loss of our ability to feel or care about anything. Why do you think technology would have this effect on us?
ReplyDeleteyes our days ARE numbered. only thing is that we are not the ones in control, but rather we have become slaves to the new cell phone and slaves to consume the brand new phone that has the same features from 7 years ago. however, that's the first part of the problem: when we consume we let go already. we use phones to communicate and share things and play games, and what do all of those things have in common? escapism. if we use it all day, we have escaped the confinements of society and we lose interest in things because we'd rather stare at computers. i will be born with the computer in my hand, and I will die with it.
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