A new cinema club kicked off at the university yesterday with a screening of the 2014 film Ex Machina, written and directed by Alex Garland. Domhnall Gleeson stars as Caleb, a programmer working for a company called Blue Book – basically a stand-in for Google – who wins a competition and gets invited to spend a week with Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the company CEO, at his place in the mountains. Soon after Caleb’s arrival, it turns out that the real reason for him being there is Ava (Alicia Vikander), a revolutionary humanoid robot Nathan’s been developing in secrecy. Nathan wants Caleb to subject Ava to the ultimate version of the Turing Test: interact with her to determine if she’s truly intelligent, sentient and self-aware on a human level.

I was initially a little bit annoyed at how the film exaggerates the significance of the Turing Test, as if there is some kind of fundamental qualitative distinction between an entity that beats the test and one that doesn’t, but that soon stopped bothering me after the film moved on to more interesting things. The usual annoyances related to the representation of technology in mainstream cinema are also there – empty technobabble, Hollywood hacking – but these are kept to a minimum and equally easy to forgive. At one point Nathan stops Caleb when the latter is trying to ask technical questions about Ava’s AI, which I felt was the author speaking to the audience as much as Nathan to Caleb: never mind how it’s supposed to work, we’re here to talk philosophy.

Such petty complaints were certainly not enough to prevent me from thoroughly enjoying the movie, and I must say I’m rather surprised I hadn’t seen it before or even been aware it existed. The discussion afterward was highly stimulating as well; because of my interest in AI ethics, I’d been invited to join it in the capacity of moderator, but this was more of a nominal role and what I really did was give my views on a couple of questions from the organisers to get the conversation started. All the big philosophical issues related to AI came up – the nature of consciousness, rights of artificial entities, AI alignment, the singularity, AI as an existential threat. Time well spent! The club nights are always on a Thursday, which I ordinarily keep reserved for band rehearsal, but I like the concept and there are interesting films coming up (including one I haven’t seen before), so I’m tempted to go again.

Meanwhile in the world of non-fictional AI, I’ve managed to keep myself appropriately busy for the past few weeks that I’ve been back at work, largely thanks to my AI ethics course and various things derived from it: analysing the course feedback from last spring, giving some lectures for a summer school in learning analytics, finishing two online courses due to be launched soon. The feedback was particularly nice this time – every student who answered the survey gave the course the highest possible overall grade, and in general there was a clear shift towards more favourable answers from last year. Granted, there were only six responses, but that’s still a third of all the students who completed the course this year, and both the completion rate and the absolute number of students who completed were the highest so far. Combined with my personal experience, it all makes me quite confident that I’m headed in the right direction with the course.

The choir is also back from its summer break, with a new musical director. We had our first rehearsal of the new term last week, and there are several small performances coming up already in the next couple of weeks, although I’m going to miss most of them because I’ll be away on a trip. During the summer some of us (myself included) participated in the creation of Owla, a new installation by sound artist Jaakko Autio, and a most interesting and rewarding experience it was. First we rehearsed and recorded a piece of music composed specifically for this occasion by a friend of the artist, and during the process Jaakko captured not just the music but also all the chatter in between takes. Once we were happy with the song, we sat down, still mic’d up, and Jaakko asked us some interview questions, had us introduce each other and finally just breathe for a few minutes. All of this audio became raw material for the installation, which opened at the Oulu Museum of Art on Wednesday, so go check it out if you’re in town!