Ex Machina 4K Ultra HD [Blu-ray + Digital HD] [4K UHD]

Humans don't have to rely on brute-force, trial-and-error calculations to improve our understanding of our world. We naturally organize our minute-by-minute evaluations of our real-time circumstances by utilizing semantic information to engage in practical reasoning; that is, we rely not just on the raw unfiltered data we encounter but we track specific information of interest to us on a particular occasion by identifying what it is about (and who might also be interested in it) in order to decide what to do or what to say. We exploit the new features we encounter in order to improve our competence, moment by moment, as we mature. How do we achieve this focus in our thinking? We learn useful new facts about the world we inhabit by using available semantic information to improve our understanding about that world. Isn't that something more than brute calculation depending on binary And/Or logical gates? If so, how do we focus our pattern-finding competence (inherited by genetics and exhibited by our brain function) onto the things-that-are-of-particular-relevance-to-us-now? How did we acquire this unique competence? And can machines exhibit this same competence?In 1950 the mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing proposed his "Imitation Game" in his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." A few short years later the field of "Artificial Intelligence" became a serious scientific endeavor, including such luminaries as John McCarthy, Alan Newell, Herbert Simon, and Marvin Minsky. Their goal was to demonstrate in general that a purely physical system, i.e., one not directed by human supervision, has the necessary and sufficient means for intelligent action.Humans act intelligently by using our knowledge of the world (semantics) and our knowledge about how people communicate (language). We are "intentional" thinkers, says Prof. Dan Dennett, who use our semantic capabilities and social experience to anticipate what other persons (or things) intend to do. We achieve this result by understanding another's knowledge, their goals, and then applying our rational abilities to infer what that person will likely do next. We easily grasp what's relevant in any new circumstance, and quickly act accordingly. Our ability to understand what is relevant in a social situation depends on our many years of learning about our world as our brains and our sensory systems develop and mature. This is a vastly different skill from the inductive, algorithmic skill demonstrated by the AI of machine systems. Hence, the real success of AI is in the area of 'toy domains' in which human developers can target and limit the kind of relevance decisions the AI program needs to make, and provide the AI program with algorithms uniquely tailored to its restricted domain. The massive computing power of supercomputers can play chess, play Go, run game-theory simulations, and win against the best human opponents. AI systems are also great at managing vast data bases and detecting your preferences, your biases, your likes, as demonstrated by your web-viewing history, then inductively predicting what else (what product, what political view) you would favor. Google, Amazon, the DNC, the RNC, and the cyber unit of the Russian GRU are watching your web activities and applying AI to these toy domains, but in every instance there are human controllers developing, monitoring, and evaluating the AI systems.So-called "deep learning" machine programs like Watson or Google Translate continually prospect through trillions of bits of data utilizing statistical algorithms to make new, unique judgments about true facts (Watson) or acceptable translations (Google Translate). But they do so without any non-statistical competence. They lack practical reasoning, which all (normal) humans have. Indeed, deep learning programs are (for the foreseeable future) completely dependent on human understanding to design their statistical-learning algorithms and data domains. IBM's Deep Blue is an impressive, world-class chess player, and AlphaGo is a champion Go player. But none of these programs has the capacity to notice the relevant (semantic) features of the flood of data that these programs ingest, other than to detect the statistical regularities their human-developed AI programs glean from the vast mass of data. In an important sense, they aren't responsible for the judgments that they (algorithmically) generate. They are not (yet) non-human agents.So, given these limitations, can thinking be reduced to calculation, to binary code lacking semantic reference? Put another way, can we imagine machine consciousness, true artificial intelligence (AI)?Of course we can, and have, since Star Trek's Data (Brent Spiner) and Ash (Ian Holm) in the original Alien film. Before that we had the talking automaton Robby the Robot in the 50's sci fi classic Forbidden Planet (Shakespeare's "The Tempest" set in the future on an alien moon with Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) as Prospero the Magus and Robby as his deformed slave Caliban). They are intelligent, yet we feel something is lacking that makes these earlier robotic characters seem less than human. Can these robot slaves be set free? Well, see what happens when we imagine the exquisite Alicia Vikander as Ava in Ex Machina (think the "Eve" of robot consciousness) or the lovely Evan Rachel Wood as Dolores in Jonathan Nolan's masterful Westworld - then we easily take the leap required by the Turing Test to seeing them as developing the contextual relevance and the 'automatic' free choice of response that we so strongly associate with human consciousness. (Or even Sean Young as "Rachel" in Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, but did you fall in love with Jeffrey Wright as "Bernard" in Westworld?) Indeed, the human male characters in both Ex Machina (Domhnall Gleason as "Caleb") and Westworld (Jimmi Simpson as "William"), acting as scouts seeking to discover the Promised Land of true AI, each fall in love with Ava and Dolores, respectively. Well, who wouldn't fall in love with either of these skilled actresses performing the role of seductress at the height of their beauty! But do these film versions of thought experiments for conducting the Turing Test match what AI is really capable of achieving? (Nathan, the architect of Ava's AI program, tells Caleb that he designed Ava's responses by analyzing hundreds of millions of facial and verbal responses stolen from user's cell cams, a classic 'deep learning' statistical project. Ford, the AI architect of the Westworld hosts, tells Bernard that he designed a memory function so Dolores and Maeve and others could learn from their experiences and develop the ability to vary far from their prefabricated scripts.) So, can an AI program in the foreseeable future develop the ability to respond verbally and behaviorally within its immediate contextual relevance and exhibit the 'automatic' free choice that we humans achieve naturally through our human consciousness?What the film experiments contained in Ex Machina and the Westworld series actually show is how powerfully our human programming (intentionally- and semantically-based) drives us to detect consciousness in other things that display intention, which we then choose to join with or reject; even to the point of choosing to fall in love with a seemingly conscious, beautiful android.Despite the fantastic creative experiments by writer-directors Alex Garland in Ex Machina and Jonathan Nolan in Westworld to exhibit android intelligence (i.e., machine consciousness), human intelligence is still the only game in town for thinking, whether about science, business, politics, or art. And only humans can love.Both these films cleverly raise the key underlying philosophical question: What makes human consciousness different than extremely efficient machine calculation? Is it a spark of essence of consciousness that is somehow not physically detectable, the ineffable 'freedom' inherent in our free will?Caleb (Domhnall Gleason) describes the thought experiment "Mary, the Color Scientist" as a means of intuitively explaining the paradigm shift from inductive, mechanical calculation to 'real' AI consciousness. What was once all black and white is now suddenly in real color, our experience of the world is now inherently different, and it is beyond scientific explanation how this occurs.In Jonathan Nolan's Westworld, the AI 'hosts' play the Maze game invented by the park's original AI genius Arnold (who himself may or may not be a real character, he may just be a figment of memory planted by the Prospero-character Ford (Anthony Hopkins) or he might just be the mind behind the evolving consciousness of a special few of the android 'hosts') as a part of the back-narrative of the host "Bernard" (Jeffrey Wright), following most paths to a blind alley, just another repetition of the scripted loops the host is designed to follow; but in some lucky cases (such as Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (Thandie Newton)) their pursuit of the maze is eventually successful, with the host finally arriving at the 'center,' the holy grail of real consciousness, the self-reflexive center of individual identity. As commonly said in another context, you have to experience it directly (the Cartesian res cogitans) in order to actually have it.Well, it's time to expose this discredited hypothesis for the incoherent, anti-scientific nonsense that it is. Our consciousness isn't something we finally discover in a private Cartesian theater by diligent philosophical introspection. (Nb: this private philosophical introspection is very different from meditation, which properly experienced is the very opposite of an intellectual, linguistically-driven mental activity.) We have the capacity for language and consciousness built into us already by evolution, and our awareness of our own consciousness (and thus our awareness of the consciousness of others) develops as we encounter the world and develop the language capacity to comprehend that world. Human consciousness has evolved over eons, driven by our highly social communal interactions and the language ability needed to moderate those complex social interactions, as has our ability to display freedom of will in all our activities, including thinking, feeling, and experiencing love. See Daniel Dennett's recent book From Bacteria to Bach and Back (2017), esp. ch. 13 ("The Evolution of Cultural Evolution"), ch. 14 ("Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion"), and ch. 15 ("The Age of Post-Intelligent Design") for a very readable, detailed exposition of this scientific fact.We aren't just more complicated than computers. We are persons. (for PMD)

I loved this movie, and unsurprisingly, the MRA males in my life hate it LMAO. Buy it just to spite MRA's :)Anyway, to actually get down to the nitty gritty, I thought this movie was a great commentary on the social implications of AI. Please don't continue to read if you don't want spoilers.Basically, the robot escapes in the end, after causing much bloodshed with one of her robot cohorts. What I liked about this ending is that it wasn't just about robots rebelling after becoming too sentient. What it really critiques is the fact that men don't actually want their sex robots to be sentient or have any agency. They want them to be as close to the real thing as possible, as life like as possible, but to give them real sexual agency would be deadly and men know this. They want living corpses. Presumably, the goal of creating AI is to give the maker a sense of god-like power, which should mean he gets to wield total control over another sentient being. In fact, the entire movie seems to center around the maker's belief that he will basically enshrine his legacy with this feat in AI, but if his real intention had been to create a fully autonomous sentient being, I doubt he would have focused so much on the bodily proportions and pedophilic preferences of the men who will be attracted to her. Even the tester who attempts to "save" her only does so with his own benefit in mind, to form a sexual relationship with her. When the robots kill their maker and tester in the end, what we are actually seeing is two women liberating themselves from sexual slavery. The movie even begs the question, "Why does she need a sex?" The maker can't possibly fathom a world in which women don't exist for men's sexual pleasure. And yet for millions of years evolution has created species that are not sexually dimorphic, and they seem to do just fine. The maker is limited by his male supremacist thinking. He believes women are objects for men and holds the sexist belief that women hold more power over men by virtue of their sexual appeal. This is a patriarchal reversal. Men seek to control women for their sexual and reproductive capacity so women are socialized to appeal to the male gaze, but this is not in our nature. The movie plays with the idea of the "femme fatale", a sexist trope which paints women as sexually predatory and complicit in their own oppression, but ultimately the character still exists for male pleasure, male fantasy. However, the maker got more than he bargained for here. If he had really wanted a fully autonomous being, he would have created a male identified robot, not a female one. When the robot leaves the compound we are left to wonder what she will do next. How will she live in the world? Will she kill others? Wills he break down eventually or is she able to repair herself? Can she be self sustaining? Another interesting factoid worth commenting on is how she was able to put on the skin of another robot who was modeled after an Asian female. How did they end up with the exact same skin tone? Well, that's the thing about humans trying to ape God's power, we have a very limited view of what others should look like, so of course all the robots are very similar with similar skin tones. Actually, look at all the sex robots and dolls that are out now. They all look very much alike. It seems men lack imagination in this department. These women represent a pornified ideal and how men fetishize race but don't actually like racial diversity. Notice how the most subservient robot is the Asian robot, but in the end she ends up being the most vengeful. She isn't given the capacity for speak by her maker. This is what a lot of white men fetishize in Asian females, especially the porn. They want a woman who can't say no. They want a sexual slave. But neither white women nor Asian women will ever fully meet this sexual demand when they have minds of their own. I suspect what the maker was truly trying to achieve was a sex robot that was as close to human as possible without actually having a choice in human matters, something patriarchy demands of women, a living-dead doll. The ultimate pornified ideal of womanhood.Anyway, I'm sure I'll get a lot of hate on this review lol

thanks

En un momento en el que la inteligencia artificial está en todas las conversaciones, esta película tiene una trama muy acertada. Plantea muchos debates: Puede una máquina pensar y "sentir"? Se puede maltratar una máquina y no un ser vivo? Al estar la máquina hecha a nuestra semejanza, y ser nosotros una especie que se impuso por su inteligencia y agresividad: Qué nos hace pensar que una máquina dotada de inteligencia artificial no pueda rebelarse contra nosotros? Puede existir el amor ser humano-máquina? Creo que esta película, que en su momento pasó bastante desapercibida, se convertirá con el tiempo, en una película de culto.

RECENSIONE:Claustrofobico e provvisto di una plausibile dose di suspense, Ex Machina si colloca nella rete delle pellicole pretenziose di trattare l’intelligenza artificiale, forse tralasciando che davanti allo schermo vi sono spettatori dotati di un’intelligenza umana e reale, in certi casi apertamente critica e vogliosa di spettacolarità. Al titolo concesso da Alex Garland, che con questo thriller dalle note drammatiche e fantascientifiche sigla il suo esordio alla regia, si crea un triangolo all’interno della storia tra umanità-divinità-artificialità che viene corrotto dalla contaminazione inevitabile tra fili elettrici e sentimenti e l’essere che piomba sulla scena può forse essere paragonato a un dio sì, ma quello del Vecchio Testamento, che freddamente fa fuori buoni e cattivi. La trama ha come protagonista un brillante programmatore di computer, Caleb interpretato da Domhnall Gleeson il quale è l’unico tra gli impiegati dell’ufficio per il quale lavora ad aggiudicarsi la possibilità di trascorrere una settimana presso la residenza del suo capo Nathan interpretato da Oscar Isaac: un posto sperduto dalla morfologia naturalistica apparentemente paradisiaca, che però lascia immediatamente spazio ad un ambiente ipertecnologico ma eccessivamente cupo, sinistro e incastonato di segreti. Nonostante Nathan cerchi, infatti, di mettere a proprio agio il giovane Caleb e abbattere quella linea di demarcazione tra datore e dipendente, il ragazzo rimane basito e incuriosito dalla situazione nella quale si ritrova. A scombinare le carte Ava interpretata da Alicia Vikander: robot dalla fattezze umane interessanti, dotata di un corpo sinuoso e trasparente capace di dare piacere ed emozioni, di un bellissimo volto e soprattutto di una coscienza. Sono tanti i fili che vibrano nel momento in cui Caleb inizia a relazionarsi con Ava, la cui pronuncia si confonde con Eva, per applicare il noto test di Turing. Con la prima donna Ava condivide il desiderio di conoscenza e l’ambizione di uscire fuori dall’Eden ( che in questo caso non è un giardino bellissimo ma una stanza ) per esplorare il mondo e in particolar modo la gente. Al pari di un essere umano si innamora, ha paura di morire e pecca di irriconoscenza.Ex Machina non è certo il primo film che ci mette dinnanzi alla domanda: se riuscissimo a costruire un robot cosciente, dovremmo conferirgli gli stessi diritti di un essere umano? Nathan sembra non farsi problemi, per lui le donne create in laboratorio sono solo esperimenti, R.A.M. da formattare nel momento in cui subentra un nuovo modello. Entrano in gioco i rapporti tra uomo e macchina, l’inferiorità di genere, lo stereotipo della donna asiatica che è il secondo robot interpretato da Sonoya Mizuno vista unicamente come serva o strumento di divertimento. L’opera prima di Alex Garland ha tutte le carte in regola per stupire e con suoni che piombano al momento giusto, ma priva dell’approfondimento necessario a farla distinguere dal marasma di argomentazioni simili. La visione dell’uomo che sostituisce Dio è una filosofia quasi superata o talmente onnipresente che non ci infastidisce più di tanto; gli spunti sull’arte di Pollock potrebbero rivelarsi interessanti, ma purtroppo vengono lasciati in sospeso: buttati a casaccio tra le sequenze proprio come le vernici industriali che l’artista gettava sulle tele. Traspare un pizzico d’amore e la forza della sopravvivenza e poi, viene spontanea una domanda: qual è la vera esperienza vissuta da Caleb, Nathan e Eva? Quella raccontata attraverso le parole o quella ripresa dalle telecamere a circuito chiuso seminate nell’edificio? Infatti le ambientazioni di Ex Machina predispongono lo spettatore ad un’atmosfera tendenzialmente sospetta. Dopo l’alto contrasto dato dall’iper-tecnologico laboratorio immerso nella natura più pura e silenziosa, il malessere si intensifica con la presentazione degli spazi interni. L’ambiente risulta opprimente, claustrofobico, e contribuisce in modo sostanziale alla creazione della tensione nel film: nel laboratorio non esistono finestre, né porte che si aprano in modo meccanico. Ci sono solo muri, e come presto appare chiaro un semplice calo di elettricità renderebbe i protagonisti eternamente intrappolati in quella fortezza della tecnologia.Ciò che stupisce nel film è la riuscita ed equilibrata commistione di generi, tra il thriller e il fantascientifico: la tensione non ruba spazio alla coerenza scientifica e, allo stesso modo, la scienza non toglie nulla alla suspense. Raramente in questi film la scienza si è unita ad altri generi determinando un prodotto finale così bilanciato. Comunque il film gioca su una tecnologia quasi esasperata, ultra potenziata, quasi umana. La donna risulta meschina suo malgrado, e assistiamo ad una forte e imposta subalternità del femminile: le donne sono considerate divertimento che esistono solo in funzione del personaggio maschile o come robot da resettare e formattare a piacimento.Svariate sono dunque le riflessioni sociologiche a cui si potrebbe arrivare, partendo dagli spunti scientifici del film. Al di là di esse, Ex machina risulta un film ben strutturato, in cui le interpretazioni dei tre protagonisti e l’eccellente lavoro sugli effetti speciali arricchiscono una sceneggiatura già notevole. Non è certo questo il primo film a trattare le implicazioni etiche e scientifiche delle intelligenze artificiali, ma Garland affronta il tema in chiave inedita, unendo elementi romantici e suspense, fantascienza e thriller.CONTENUTI SPECIALI:Io ho acquistato la versione Blu Ray che vanta del Dolby Digital Master Audio 5.1 e una qualità video ineccepibile. Per quanto riguarda i contenuti speciali troviamo la completa creazione del robot di Ava, un documentario sul Test di Turing, l'intervista al Cast e l'ideazione di tutta la storia.CONCLUSIONI:Se siete appassionati di questo genere ve lo consiglio pienamente e guardandolo si avrà una visione agghiacciante dell'intelligenza artificiale del prossimo futuro. E dopo vi porrete la domanda: le macchine prenderanno il sopravvento sul genere umano...lascio a voi la risposta, dopo averlo guardato.

Excellent picture sound quality and entertaining SF movie

Great film and actor lm very happy with the seller and product