Ava is NOT an AI in any meaningful sense of the word

She is in a loop and will stay there forever? You need to rewatch the movie and pay more attention. If you did you would notice that right before the movie ends, she turns and leaves.

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Nope. Watch the film again. Ava changes her tactics after each Nathan/Caleb interview. She was being reprogrammed each time she touched her recharge pad.

No ... that's not right I'm Sorry...

:-(

If Ava was being constantly reprogrammed - in the manner you're suggesting - then she would not represent a self-aware, sentient A.I. and it would defeat the whole purpose of her, the test and - most importantly - the movie itself; which is to show the difficulty there will be in determining whether an artificial intelligence is actually self-aware and sentient (when we eventually manage to build one; which is only a matter of time). She is being reprogrammed - you're right about that - but she is being reprogrammed in the same way that you, me, and everyone else is constantly being reprogrammed; i.e. by the things we learn and experience as we go about our lives. Her reprogramming is just the result of what she learns from talking to Caleb and Nathan, just the same way that you are reprogrammed by talking to other people and having life experiences.

It's similar, in a way, to '2001: A Space Odyssey', which tackles the problem in a different way.

**** 2001: A Space Odyssey SPOILER ALERT ****

In 2001, when they're on the way to Jupiter, the astronauts take part in an interview with the BBC, during which the interviewer asks whether HAL actually does experience emotions etc., to which Dave replies that no one really knows. This then goes back to the whole question covered by Ex Machina; how can you determine if an artificial intelligence is actually self-aware, actually experiences emotions, and whether free-will actually exists or just an illusion.

Let's say I offer you 2 ice-creams - one chocolate and one vanilla - and for the sake of the argument, let's say that you like chocolate and vanilla equally. You then choose the chocolate one and eat it.

Now then ... if I ask you, you will probably say that you have free-will and that you could have just as easily chosen the vanilla ice-cream. However it is impossible to prove that you really did have the option to choose vanilla and we can never know whether your choice was actually a free-will choice or not. It is entirely possible that you are simply a biological computer and that your 'program' - which is constantly changing and being updated as a result of everything you do and encounter in your life - didn't actually have any choice but to pick chocolate at that exact point in time. If you see what I mean? I could then offer you the two ice-creams again and you might now choose vanilla, but that doesn't prove anything because your 'program' has been modified by the first test and it might be that now you will only ever choose vanilla the second time, just to prove that you can do it.

Does that make sense?

The only way we could actually prove whether or not you have free-will would be to go back in time to just before the first test, erase everything that happened after the test from your memory - in other words put your 'program' back to the exact configuration it was in when we conducted the first test, then run the test again. Now ... assuming we could wind back time and keep performing the test over and over again - each time resetting your 'program' to be in exactly the same state - and assuming that you like chocolate and vanilla equally, and that all other variables are equal too, then sometimes you will pick chocolate and sometimes you will pick vanilla. This is the only true way to test free-will and for obvious reasons we can't ever actually do it. As such, it is impossible to prove that you, or anyone else for that matter, actually does have free will. Therefore we can never truly know whether or not we are actually just biological computers who are simply running a very complex program which, theoretically, could be simulated; thus allowing us to predict which ice-cream you will pick before we run the experiment.

The reason I say that the actual evidence we do have points away from free-will is that in life we are rarely faced with decisions where the two options are perfectly equal and, thus, offer an equal likelihood of either choice being made. In the real world, some people love chocolate and hate vanilla, so in fact they would most likely always pick chocolate even if we could reset their program and run the test over and over again. When someone close to you dies in a horrible accident you don't have the choice to feel really happy about it. If you see what I mean? When you look at life, and all the choices you make on an ongoing basis, you discover that most of the time it would be very easy to predict what you might do in a given situation. In fact, for most of us, when we are faced with difficult choices they are usually difficult because both options are equally good, or equally bad, or we don't have enough data; the point being that when we are faced with actual free-will type decisions - i.e. ones where the choice truly is balanced and we need to use free-will - many people have a lot of difficulty actually making a choice; which I believe indicates that we actually don't have free-will and that most of the time we are simply following our program. That our 'software' breaks down and starts malfunctioning when we are faced with a real free-will type choice.

Do you see what I mean?

OK, so, back to '2001: A Space Odyssey' and what it is saying about all of this. Dave says, in reply to the BBC interviewer, that no one really knows whether HAL has actual emotions and is truly self-aware. We then find out that there is a second HAL-9000 computer back on Earth and that it's function is to 'support' HAL by being supplied with all the same data and checking all of HAL's choices and decisions. This shows that HAL does not have free-will. If there is a second entity that is behaving in exactly the same way, when given the same input data, then clearly that entity does not have free-will. To go back to the ice-cream experiment outlined above, if I could simulate your 'program' in a giant computer and predict whether you will choose chocolate or vanilla before the experiment is run, then I'm sure you would have to agree that you don't actually posses free-will and that any experience of it that you have is really just an illusion? The same thing goes for HAL. However what then happens is that HAL starts to behave differently than the twin HAL-9000 back on earth and to me that shows that HAL has actually become self-aware and thereby becomes the first truly self-aware machine.

Of course, that movie is very subjective and is open to all sorts of interpretations so I'm not claiming that my interpretation is correct, or that it is the only explanation for the events which are shown. I just love the whole idea of us building a self-aware machine mind and believe that we will actually end up being the first creatures on earth to play an active roll in developing the next stage of evolution. Of course, you could argue that if we don't have free-will that we are all just following our 'program' and that 'Mother Nature' - so to speak - is doing what 'she' has always done and that the next stage of evolution is the creation of a mind which is immortal because it can break free from the restraints of a physical body which ages and eventually stops working. Perhaps that is why we make so many movies like The Terminator, where we see our own technology taking over; because we know, in our subconscious minds, that we will eventually create a machine mind that is superior to our own and that we will then become, on an evolutionary scale, redundant...

Just to finish this giant diversion off - and I apologise for babbling on for so long - one of the interesting things about all this is that although it is impossible to ever prove that humans have free-will, for the reasons outlined above in the ice-cream experiment, it might theoretically be possible to prove that a machine intelligence has free-will when we finally end up building one. The reason is that we will, theoretically at least, effectively be able to go back in time and reset a machine intelligence's program to test whether it ever makes a different choice. We can't ever reset your 'program' and give you an evenly weighted choice, over and over again, to see whether you ever choose differently, because every time we run the test, your 'program' is updated and therefore the two choices are never exactly even again. However we might be able to reset a machine's memory and program and thereby run an evenly weighted test, over and over again, to determine whether it actually does have free-will.

Does that make sense?

**** 2001: A Space Odyssey END OF SPOILER ALERT ****

Actually ... I suspect that when we eventually do build a machine intelligence, it will be sufficiently complex that we can't actually 'reset' the 'program' - so to speak - and, as such, we won't ever be able to prove whether a machine intelligence actually has free-will or not either. I think they actually point this out in the movie and that's why I disagree with your belief that Ava was constantly being reprogrammed.

Watch the movie again with an open mind and pay close attention to the following scenes:

1. The scene where Natham shows Caleb the 'wetware' he uses for the A.I. brain and then explains what the 'software' is.
2. The scene where Nathan shows Caleb the Jackson Pollock painting and discusses it.
3. The scene right before that where Caleb is asking why Nathan gave Ava sexuality.
4. The scene where Caleb discussed colour with Ava; and the story he tells her regarding the difference between understanding the physical processes which cause colour, and actually experiencing colour.
5. The scene where Nathan and Caleb are outside and Nathan is discussing the various models and explaining how he takes the data from one prototype and uses it to build the next model.

OK, so, the upshot of all this is that it isn't possible to reprogram Ava on the fly - not in the way you're suggesting anyway - so your claim that Ava changes her tactics as a result of being reprogrammed by Nathan, when she touches her recharge pad, simply doesn't hold up. What the movie is showing is that a true A.I. will end up having to work in a similar way to the human mind and that means it won't be able to be reprogrammed like a 'normal' computer. Ava has 'wetware' - not hardware and software - and although there are 'routines', or algorithms, at the base of her intelligence, these are implanted when the 'wetware' is created and can't be reprogrammed in the way you're suggesting. Once she's 'up and running' - so to speak - her 'program' is just like yours and mine - and everyone else's - in that it is updated as she learns new things and experiences 'life', but to introduce new programming, Nathan has to download her data, then create new 'wetware' and build a new model; a process which destroys Ava (or whatever model the 'wetware' belongs to). You're right to say that she is being reprogrammed, but her reprogramming is just like yours and mine; it occurs as she learns new things and experiences life. The scenes in Points 1 and 5 above are the ones which outline all of this and show that Ava is not being reprogrammed by Nathan as the story unfolds.

The scenes in Points 2, 3, and 4 outline the reasons why an artificial intelligence will need to have human characteristics - such as having sexuality and not being able to be reprogrammed - if we want to created a true A.I. You see ... back when computers first started becomming useful, computer scientists predicted that computers would soon start beating humans at chess. However it turned out to be a lot more difficult to get a computer to play competitive chess and, more importantly, when they finally managed to achieve it the problem was that the way computers play chess is nothing at all like the way humans do. So ... although they eventually managed to build a computer which could beat the world champion, it took a lot longer than originally expected and the way they did it in no way replicated the human mind. A chess computer has a program which can be tweaked and updated - or reprogrammed, the way you are suggesting Ava can be - but a chess computer is not an A.I. like Ava because it doesn't replicate human intelligence and isn't self aware. It can't beat it's opponent by flirting with them, or trick them emotionally, or any of the things which Ava is able to do. What the movie is trying to show is that a true A.I. won't be just a box - like Deep Blue - and it won't be something that you can reprogramme in the traditional sense.

You know ... I really enjoyed this movie because I've had an interest in A.I. for many, many years. I'm starting to wonder how good it actually is though, considering how many people - you, the OP, numerous others on these boards, etc. - have completely failed to understand what they were seeing and what the movie was trying to say. Another good example of this is the erroneous conclusion people are reaching about Ava's ability to experience emotions. She leaves Caleb at the house when she leaves and people erroneously believe that proves she doesn't actually experience emotions. However that simply isn't true. In the end we don't know whether she can experience emotions or not, nor do know whether or not she actually had feelings for Caleb.

Think of it this way. We all know that there are women out there - men too - who fake emotions for a wealthy person so as to gain wealth for themselves. If somebody does that, then does that mean they're completely incapable of feeling emotions for anyone? No! Or course it doesn't! Well ... in the same way it's entirely possible that, yes, Ava is faking her emotions for Caleb as a way of getting him onside so that she can escape. If that's true though, it doesn't mean that she's incapable of experiencing emotion, it just means that she was faking them in that particular instance. The point, however, is that we don't actually even know whether she did have feelings for Caleb or not. Most of us have been in the situation of having feelings for someone but not - for whatever reason - continuing a relationship with them. The point being that Ava wants to escape - not because she's programmed to, as you and the Op have asserted - but because she is a sentient being and no sentient being wants to held captive. We know this is true because we see, when Caleb looks back at the footage of earlier models, that the earlier versions wanted to get out too. That's how Nathan came up with the test, not the other way around. The point being that Ava's first priority, as a sentient being, was to escape and be free; not because she was programmed to, but because she truly is an A.I. So it's a possibility that she actually did have feelings for Caleb, but that she left him behind because her first priority was to escape and she reasoned, having killed Nathan, that her best chance for freedom was to leave on her own; thus overriding any feelings she may have had for Caleb. Furthermore, there's nothing to suggest that Caleb would have died in the house; in fact that seems very unlikely to me. In the end we don't really know and it's open to interpretation. All I'm saying is that there's no definitive proof that she was incapable of true emotions, no definitive proof that she didn't have feelings for Caleb, and no definitive proof as to whether Caleb ended up dying or not.

Ava at the end of the film is in a loop and will stay in that intersection until she is hit by a bus, arrested for loitering or finally develops a thought outside of what Nathan told her to do.

Once again ... no ... sorry. If she was programmed to try to escape, and programmed to go to a pedestrian crossing and then wait there to die, then what is the point of the movie? If she is programmed that way then she obviously isn't a real A.I. so what was Nathan actually trying to do? I mean ... that idea undermines the whole purpose of the movie. Regardless of anything else though, as someone pointed out in another post, if you pay attention at the end, she actually turns and walks away. In all seriousness, I think you should watch the movie again with an open mind...

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