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Ava, the most advanced AI, is an eerie mixture of robot and woman (Image&colon; Universal Pictures/Rex)

IT'S a rare thing to see a movie about science that takes no prisoners intellectually. Alex Garland's Ex Machina is just that&colon; a stylish, spare and cerebral psycho-techno-thriller, which gives a much-needed shot in the arm for smart science fiction.

Reclusive billionaire genius Nathan, played by Oscar Isaac, creates Ava, an intelligent and very attractive robot played by Alicia Vikander. He then struggles with the philosophical and ethical dilemmas his creation poses, while all hell breaks loose.

Many twists and turns add nuance to the plot, which centres on the evolving relationships between the balletic Ava and Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a hotshot programmer invited by Nathan to be the "human component in a Turing test", and between Caleb and Nathan, as Ava's extraordinary capabilities become increasingly apparent.

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Everything about this movie is good. Compelling acting (with only three speaking parts), exquisite photography and set design, immaculate special effects, a subtle score and, above all, a hugely imaginative screenplay combine under Garland's precise direction to deliver a cinematic experience that grabs you and never lets go.

The best science fiction often tackles the oldest questions. At the heart of Ex Machina is one of our toughest intellectual knots, that of artificial consciousness. Is it possible to build a machine that is not only intelligent but also sentient&colon; that has consciousness, not only of the world but also of its own self? Can we construct a modern-day Golem, that lumpen being of Jewish folklore which is shaped from unformed matter and can both serve humankind and turn against it in certain conditions? And if we could, what would happen to us?

The acid test

Putting aside the tedious business of actually building a conscious AI, we face the challenge of figuring out whether the attempt succeeds. The standard reference for this sort of question is Alan Turing's eponymous test, in which a human judge interrogates both a candidate machine and another human. A machine passes the test when the judge consistently fails to distinguish between them.

While the Turing test has provided a trope for many AI-inspired movies (such as Spike Jonze's excellent Her), Ex Machina takes things much further. In a sparkling exchange between Caleb and Nathan, Garland nails the weakness of Turing's version of the test, a focus on the disembodied exchange of messages, and proposes something far more interesting. "The challenge is to show you that she's a robot. And see if you still feel she has consciousness," Nathan says to Caleb.

This shifts the goalposts in a vital way. What matters is not whether Ava is a machine. It is not even whether Ava, even though a machine, can be conscious. What matters is whether Ava makes a conscious person feel that Ava is conscious. The brilliance of Ex Machina is that it reveals the Turing test for what it really is&colon; a test of the human, not of the machine. And Garland is not necessarily on our side.

"The film reveals the Turing test for what it really is&colon; a test of the human, not of the machine"

Is consciousness a matter of social consensus? Is it more relevant whether people believe (or feel) that something (or someone) is conscious than whether it is in fact actually conscious? Or, does something being "actually conscious" rest on other people's beliefs about it being conscious, or on its own beliefs about its consciousness (beliefs that may themselves depend on how it interprets others' beliefs about it)? And exactly what is the difference between believing and feeling in situations like this?

It seems to me that my consciousness, here and now, is not a matter of social consensus or of my simply believing or feeling that I am conscious. It seems to me, simply, that I am conscious here and now. When I wake up and smell the coffee, there is a real experience of coffee-smelling going on.

But let me channel Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, for a moment. What would it seem like if it seemed to me that my being conscious were a matter of social consensus or beliefs or feelings about my own conscious status? Is what it "seems like" to me relevant at all when deciding how consciousness comes about or what has consciousness?

Before vanishing completely into a philosophical rabbit hole, it is worth saying that questions like these are driving much influential current research on consciousness.

Philosophers and scientists like Daniel Dennett, David Rosenthal and Michael Graziano defend, in various ways, the idea that consciousness is somehow illusory and what we really mean in saying we are conscious is that we have certain beliefs about mental states, that these states have distinctive functional properties, or that they are involved in specific sorts of attention.

Another theoretical approach accepts that conscious experience is real and sees the problem as one of determining its physical or biological mechanism. Some leading neuroscientists such as Giulio Tononi, and recently, Christof Koch, take consciousness to be a fundamental property, much like mass-energy and electrical charge, that is expressed through localised concentrations of "integrated information".

Others, like philosopher John Searle, believe that consciousness is an essentially biological property that emerges in some systems but not in others, for reasons as-yet unknown.

And in the film we hear about Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. His premise was that researchers had managed to build a computer programmed in English that can respond to written Chinese with written Chinese so convincingly it easily passes the Turing test, persuading a human Chinese speaker that the program understands and speaks Chinese. Does the machine really "understand" Chinese (Searle called this "strong AI") or is it only simulating the ability ("weak" AI)?

There is also a nod to the notional "Mary", the scientist, who, while knowing everything about the physics and biology of colour vision, has only ever experienced black, white and shades of grey. What happens when she sees a red object for the first time? Will she learn anything new? Does consciousness exceed the realms of knowledge?

All of the above illustrates how academically savvy and intellectually provocative Ex Machina is. Hat-tips here to Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, and writer and geneticist Adam Rutherford, whom Garland did well to enlist as science advisers.

Not every scene invites deep philosophy of mind, with the film encompassing everything from ethics, the technological singularity, Ghostbusters and social media to the erosion of privacy, feminism and sexual politics within its subtle scope.

But when it comes to riffing on the possibilities and mysteries of brain, mind and consciousness, Ex Machina doesn't miss a trick.

Scientific straitjacket

As a scientist, it is easy to moan when films don't stack up against reality, but there is usually little to be gained from nitpicking over inaccuracies and narrative inventions. Such criticisms can seem petty and reinforcing of the stereotype of scientists as humourless gatekeepers of facts and hoarders of equations.

But these complaints sometimes express a sense of missed opportunity rather than injustice, a sense that intellectual riches could have been exploited, not sidelined, in making a good movie. AI, neuroscience and consciousness are among the most vibrant and fascinating areas of contemporary science, and what we are discovering far outstrips anything that could be imagined out of thin air.

In his directorial debut, Garland has managed to capture the thrill of this adventure in a film that is effortlessly enthralling, whatever your background. This is why, on emerging from it, I felt lucky to be a neuroscientist. Here is a film that is a better film, because of and not despite its engagement with its intellectual inspiration.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Conscious awakening"

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Ex Machina : Quest to create an AI takes no prisoners

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Ava, the most advanced AI, is an eerie mixture of robot and woman (Image: Universal Pictures/Rex) IT'S a rare thing to see a movie about science that takes no prisoners intellectually. Alex Garland's Ex Machina is just that: a stylish, spare and cerebral psycho-techno-thriller, which gives a much-needed shot in the arm for smart science fiction.

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Alicia Vikander as Ava in "Ex Machina," a film directed by Alex Garland. Credit... A24

In the last few years, I've become increasingly fascinated by artificial intelligence, and in particular our escalating fear of it. It seemed to me that our increasingly holistic relationship with technology and abstract clouds of information was compounding this fear and perhaps edging it into paranoia.

These thoughts were crystallized while writing and directing the new film " Ex Machina." It tells the story of a young male coder in a tech company who is given the job of assessing the level of consciousness in a female-presenting robot called Ava. He's bewitched, gives up the day job and starts making plans to elope.

I remember feeling pleased when I hit upon this plot. Robot sentience hadn't really been tackled since Steven Spielberg's " A.I. " (2001), which was less interested in artificial intelligence than the title suggested, and the ideas of machine-thinking and human consciousness felt like a rich seam.

So I was dismayed when after submitting the script, I discovered I wasn't alone in writing an A.I. movie. There was "Her" (2013), which tracked a love affair between a man and his computer's sentient operating system. Next was "Transcendence," in which Johnny Depp uploaded his mind to the Internet. In "Automata" and "Chappie," servile robots acquired independence. In "Big Hero 6," an A.I. befriends a boy. And in "Avengers: Age of Ultron," out next week, a robot tries what we all know they're secretly planning: the destruction of mankind.

Among filmmakers there was an A.I. party going on, to which we were late. Worse yet, someone else had shown up in the same dress. Another film had freakish similarities to "Ex Machina." It was called "The Machine" and also starred a female-presenting A.I. named Ava. (Initially I wondered if it was an incredibly early porn parody of "Ex Machina" that had missed the more obvious riff of "Sex Machina." But it turned out to be a thoughtful action movie by the Welsh writer-director Caradog James.)

Alongside this sudden preoccupation in the film world, a growing number of public figures began making statements about the inherent danger of A.I. research. The gist was that if mankind wasn't careful, we would code the terms of our own destruction by robot overlords. These are warnings one might expect from a religious perspective, concerned with the godlike aspects of creating sentient life. But interestingly, the warnings were actually coming from the science and tech worlds.

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Hugh Jackman, foreground, in "Chappie." Credit... Stephanie Blomkamp/Columbia Pictures

They began as distant thunder. A high-level cognitive robotics researcher told me almost in passing that he was considering telling his children that they should not have children themselves, because he was so concerned about the A.I.-shaped world on our horizon. By the time "Ex Machina" was in postproduction, the thunder was a full-blown lightning storm, with the bright discharges coming from major public figures of our age.

The theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking told us that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, told us that A.I. was "potentially more dangerous than nukes." Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple, told us that "computers are going to take over from humans" and that "the future is scary and very bad for people."

With entertainment and science joining forces to spin cautionary tales, it felt very alarming, and very zeitgeist. But it also felt confusing, in that zeitgeist is a response to something. Film production runs in roughly three-year cycles, and if you looked back three years from the glut of A.I.-related releases, you might expect to find an event that had led to the screenplays. Perhaps a Nobel Prize relating to consciousness, or a successful robot project with the profile of the Large Hadron Collider, or Dolly the sheep. But there was nothing. In fact, breakthroughs in A.I. research were either conspicuous by their absence, or so nuanced that you would struggle to convince lay people that the breakthrough existed at all. This raised a question: Was A.I. anxiety in part a projected fear of something else? In particular, I wondered if it stemmed from a general disconnect in our relationship with technology.

We have laptops and cellphones and tablets, and most of us don't understand how they work. But the devices seem to understand how we work. They anticipate what we want to say in text messages and search-engine inputs, and know what we want to buy, see and read. This one-way understanding makes us anxious. We locate the anxiety in the machines, which translates as anxiety about A.I.

But there is a mistake here. The machines in question are not strong A.I.'s. They are weak. They have no motivation, no intention; they're neutral. The thing with an agenda is us: consumers, who want to buy the machines, and manufacturers, who want to sell them. And looming over both, giant tech companies, whose growth only ever seems to be exponential, whose practices are opaque, and whose power is both massive and without true oversight. Combine all this with government surveillance and lotus-eating public acquiescence, and it's not the machine component that scares me. It's the human component.

So here is a counterargument, in favor of the machines. In very broad terms, human behavior is frightening when it is unreasonable. And reason might be precisely the area where artificial intelligence excels.

I can imagine a world where machine intelligence runs hospitals and health services, allocating resources more quickly and competently than any human counterpart.

Public works aside, the investigation into strong artificial intelligence might also lead to understanding human consciousness, the most interesting aspect of what we are. This in turn could lead to machines that have our capacity for reason and sentience, but different energy requirements and a completely different relationship with mortality. That could mean a different future. A longer future. In which case, we could rephrase the warnings of Mr. Hawking and Mr. Wozniak. Where they say that A.I. will spell the end of humans, we could say that one day, A.I. will be what survives of us.

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Alex Garland of 'Ex Machina' Talks About Artificial Intelligence

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In the last few years, I've become increasingly fascinated by artificial intelligence, and in particular our escalating fear of it. It seemed to me that our increasingly holistic relationship with technology and abstract clouds of information was compounding this fear and perhaps edging it into paranoia.

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Alex Garland has one thought when it comes to the AI revolution: Bring it on. After a career of writing novels ( The Beach) and screenplays ( 28 Days Later, Dredd), he's moving into the director's chair with April's Ex Machina, a movie that pushes the discussion of AI and ethics into discomfiting territory. When an alpha-male tech bro (played by Oscar Isaac) secretly develops a robot named Ava, he asks one of his employees (Domhnall Gleeson) to evaluate her wares using the Turing Test. Things get tense, even dangerous-but unlike film androids who go all cogito ergo slay, Ava is thoughtful, even kind, and may be a better heiress to the world than the human who created her.
Ex Machina isn't the usual AI movie. How'd you get interested in sentient computers?
I'm 44, and I've grown up keeping pace with developments in videogames and computers. When I was 12 or 13, home computers arrived; your parents bought them, expecting there'd be education in them but all you'd do is play videogames. But I did a bit of programming in Basic. I'd do really very simple "Hello World" type programs that would give this machine the very barest sentience. I remember quite well the kind of electric sense that you'd get that the machine was alive-with certain knowledge that it wasn't.

Years later, I got into a long series of arguments with a friend of mine whose chief interest is neuroscience. He thinks that computers are never going to become sentient, and he has some good, scientific arguments why that is the case. But on an instinctive level, I just didn't agree with him. I started doing a lot of reading about AI, mind, and consciousness.
You've worked with complex themes before, so this isn't totally new territory.
As far back as The Beach there's stuff about multiverse theory and stuff like that. I worked on a film called Sunshine, which had at its heart an issue to do with heat death in the universe. Although a tiny bit of the stuff in there was reasonable from a scientific viewpoint, it was largely bullshit-it made about as much sense as putting on the warp drive in Star Trek. It was frustrating. I felt like I'd dropped the ball in some important respect. I'm not tearing the film down-there are things about it I really love-but this was something that bugged me. When I started working on this I thought, "This is something I want which is reasonable."
What was your AI education?
I've got an intellectual limitation in terms of what I'm able to understand. It's partly intelligence, and partly understanding of mathematics; the two collide together to create a pretty impermeable brick wall for me. But what I can read and understand is the philosophical ideas that surround it.

In particular, I came across a book by a guy called Murray Shanahan, a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College, the UK's version of MIT. I felt very sympathetic to its argument when I read it. So when I wrote this script I contacted him, and also a couple of other people, and, "I want you to be really tough on this script and make sure it stands up."
And does it?
There were two conceits we made. One is that you can create a sentient machine and the other is that you have incredibly high-level robotics which let that sentient machine have a face, to have nuance. Now those are huge conceits, and somebody might reasonably say it's equivalent to the warp drive. But it is science fiction-and within those conceits, I tried to be quite tough about it.
What kind of AI science fiction did you draw on for inspiration?
You can assume a level of film literacy with cinema audiences that you can't assume with books. People may or may not have read Heart of Darkness, right? However, they're very likely to have seen Apocalypse Now. So when you're working on a sci-fi movie that contains within it artificial intelligence and robots, you can be pretty sure people know something about HAL and 2001. You can be even more sure they know about Blade Runner and replicants. So you write it knowing that you're aiming at a strong literate audience because they almost certainly will be.
And they'll likely be ready to pick your movie apart, too.
It could create a problem. In designing the robot, I didn't want people thinking of another movie when she walked onscreen. If she's colored gold you immediately think of C-3PO, and the feminine aesthetics wouldn't cancel that out. We had to steer clear of iconic robots: the film Metropolis, or that Bjork video directed by Chris Cunningham ["All Is Full of Love"].
People seem to want to compare Ex Machina to Her-the AI is different, but you play with that theme of creating a "perfect woman."
There are two totally separate strands in this film as far as I'm concerned. One of them is about AI and consciousness, and the other is about social constructs: why this guy would create a machine in the form of a girl in her early twenties in order to present that machine to this young guy for this test.
How important was Ava's design to the overall look of this film?
It seems very familiar yet wholly unique. There might be a little bit of Maria from Metropolis, but not much else.
It's super important. It's crucial because it needed to look beautiful in a particular way. It needed to look really, really beautiful and visually striking.
When Nathan explains why he made Ava look the way she does, it's kind of creepy.
Yeah, but that's exactly the point. You're supposed to think it's creepy. You're not supposed to warm to him over that stuff; you're supposed to feel unnerved and that this is uncomfortable. And therefore she needs to be rescued.
Nathan in many ways is an archetypal Silicon Valley guy. Is his character a commentary on those dudes?
It's more alpha-male-meets-non-alpha-male. I like the mixture of someone who's incredibly aggressive and kind of bullying, but is couching everything in this dude-bro speak as if that takes the edge off of what he's actually doing. I'd suspect you'd find that just as easily on Wall Street as you would in Silicon Valley.
Have you been following the recent debates about AI and ethics?
It's a big question. I think if you're talking about nonsentient AIs-the advanced versions of the sort we already have-then it's a lot to be very concerned about and a lot to be aware of. It's not hard to imagine a situation where an AI-controlled drone turns out to be more effective on a battlefield than a human-controlled drone, and maybe doesn't have the problems of post-traumatic stress that humans suffer. What you've done is hand the machine a life-and-death decision over a human. The ethical problems contained within that are absolutely obvious.

But broadly speaking, if you create a new consciousness in the form of a machine, that isn't necessarily too significantly different in my mind from two adults creating a child. You do have a problem if that new machine is more intelligent than the parents, but again we also have some experience with that too. You could have two parents that create Einstein, and another two who create Stalin.
So you're not worried about Skynet.
I kind of welcome it. Humans are going die on this planet. It might be because of eco-disasters or maybe because of changes that happen within the solar system or the sun. But when it happens, we're not going to go through a wormhole and go to another galaxy and find an old planet. It's just not going to happen. What will survive on our behalf is AIs-if we manage to create them. That's not problematic, it's desirable.
Ex Machina kind of feels like it was made with that in mind.
I hope that's implicit in the film. It was definitely conceived of as a pro-AI movie. It's humans who fuck everything up; machines have a pretty good track record in comparison to us.
It seems like you lucked out with your cast, especially Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson.
Because they're in Star Wars?
Well, yeah.
When I was setting out to cast Ex Machina, the only thing I really knew 100 percent for sure is that it wasn't going to work to get a "film star." They could actually sink the whole thing quite easily. So it was mainly just about finding really good actors. The problem we had was not identifying who would be good, but can we get them because there are other people who also wanted them.
So what's next?
There's a book [producer] Scott Rudin gave me called Annihilation, a spectacular novel by Jeff VanderMeer. I really loved it, so I'm going to try that. But I have no idea if that'll work out.
What about another 28 Days Later sequel? 28 Months Later?
Danny Boyle and [producer] Andrew McDonald and I never wanted a third one partly because we didn't have an idea that we felt excited about, but I think we might now have one.
Can you share the idea?
Are you crazy? I'd get fucking shot if I told you that. [Laughs.] No, I can't tell you. It's just at the really early stage. What we have to do is get a writer. What you want is a writer who will subvert the idea, take some ownership of it. Hopefully Andrew will find a writer who says "my idea is better anyway" and rips it to shreds and comes up with something even better. That's what I'd like.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/uURbDmGIRNE

Watch a trailer for Ex Machina

Angela Watercutter (@waterslicer) interviewed director Michael Mann in issue 23.01.

Photographed at Spring Studios, London; Grooming by Camilla Hewitt

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Ex Machina's Director on Why A.I. Is Humanity's Last Hope

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Alex Garland has one thought when it comes to the AI revolution: Bring it on. After a career of writing novels ( The Beach) and screenplays ( 28 Days Later, Dredd), he's moving into the director's chair with April's Ex Machina, a movie that pushes the discussion of AI and ethics into discomfiting territory.

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“One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa,” says Nathan. “An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction.” It’s the sort of comment that sounds humble, but really isn’t: why would they even give a crap?

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Unlike most films about artificial intelligence, Ex Machina isn't about technological anxiety. "The anxiety in this film is much more directed at the humans," director Alex Garland tells NPR's Audie Cornish. "It was more in defense of artificial intelligence."

Garland tackled the zombie apocalypse as the writer behind the film 28 Days Later. In Ex Machina - his first film as director - he introduces us to Ava, a creation that is part woman and part machine. There's no hiding that Ava is a machine - but a very, very smart one.

"It's almost like a sort of post-Turing test," Garland says, referring to the test of whether or not a human can tell when they are interacting with a machine. Traditionally the Turing test was a blind one: "The machine would be on the other side of a closed door ... and there'd be a bunch of controls and if the human was tricked into believing they were interacting with another human rather than a machine, then the test was deemed to have been passed."

But the test in Ex Machina is different. "The machine is presented clearly as a machine," Garland explains. "There's no attempt to hide that it might be a machine. And it's really just a test to see if the machine has sentience or a humanlike consciousness."

Ex Machina raises questions about how we define consciousness, and how our instincts about consciousness may mislead us. And it also recasts what the face of artificial intelligence might look like. Garland explains that he used the film's sound design to give a "slightly nursery" quality to the character. It's "intended to present Ava the machine as having a kind of innocence, a sort of undamaged, untarnished quality," he says.

Interview Highlights
On the way Ava's machinery is not hidden
The trick of the film, the way that the film intends to work is to present something which is unambiguously a machine and then gradually remove your sense of Ava being a machine, even while you continue to see her being that way. And the sound design is a key part of that. You can hear ... the sounds of the bits of machinery moving, which aren't specified. They're not quite gears and cogs and pistons, they're something slightly odder than that. And there's also this pulse which is not dissimilar in some respects to a heartbeat, although it isn't a heartbeat.

So the first time she appears, there's no doubt about her machine status. Large parts of her body are transparent and you can see through them. ... Around [her] torso section there's a very, very light mesh which follows the contours of her human form. Hopefully that starts to sort of introduce the more humanlike aspects of her in a sort of physical representation or a visual one. And they're all designed to give a sense of life, but a sense of life which is other in some way.
On tech-billionaire Nathan who defies the "geeky villain" stereotype
He's arrogant, essentially by virtue of the fact that he's incredibly intelligent and powerful. And in [the tech] world, you do encounter people like that. They truly are extremely intelligent and those guys really are smart and you just need to kind of accept that, you know? ...

He's also playing a kind of meta-game the whole time. ... Are you seeing what this guy's actually like? Or are you seeing a presentation that he is giving of himself in a knowing way ... in order to present himself as predatory, misogynistic, physically intimidating, threatening? ...

This guy is arrogant and powerful and probably, let's say, aware about that geeky image. ... And if you look at these guys, often they are sort of fighting against that. It looks like they spend a lot of time in the gym, and they are kind of buff and they're adopting alpha personas, I guess, which they didn't used to have.
On how he got interested in artificial intelligence
I just got very interested in the area of artificial intelligence and, in particular, how it relates to human consciousness because it's about what we value about each other. It's primarily our minds, you know, that's what we interact with and it's what we respect about each other. ... And I could see that there was a lot of anxiety floating around about A.I.s. And I wanted to address it partly because I thought it was misplaced. ...

I think there's a sense in which we feel that we don't understand how our cellphones and our laptops work ... but those things seem to understand a lot about us. Now that's not really about artificial intelligence, it's about tech paranoia.

A lot of the anxiety doesn't come from any real situation that A.I.s are about to take us over or the world is about to change because of A.I.s in any fundamental kind of way - not at the moment at any rate. It's got more to do with big tech companies and the Internet and search engines and social media and that kind of thing. I think there's a sense in which we feel that we don't understand how our cellphones and our laptops work ... but those things seem to understand a lot about us. Now that's not really about artificial intelligence, it's about tech paranoia. So somewhere in this I think I'm trying to look at that, too.

But I think the other thing I was interested in was the way tech companies present themselves. So Oscar Isaac's character Nathan talks in this very kind of familiar, pal-y way. He uses the word "dude" and "bro" a lot. And I felt that this was sometimes how tech companies present themselves to us. They're kind of like our friends. They say, "Hey pal, hey dude," like we're kind of mates, you know, "I'm not really a big tech company, I'm actually your friend and we're hanging out sort of at a bar or at the beach and we're sort of part of each other's lifestyle, but at the same time I'm going to take a lot of money off you and I'm going to take all of your data and rifle through your address book" and that kind of thing.

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More Fear Of Human Intelligence Than Artificial Intelligence In 'Ex Machina'

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Unlike most films about artificial intelligence, Ex Machina isn't about technological anxiety. "The anxiety in this film is much more directed at the humans," director Alex Garland tells NPR's Audie Cornish. "It was more in defense of artificial intelligence." Garland tackled the zombie apocalypse as the writer behind the film 28 Days Later.

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Unlike most films about artificial intelligence, Ex Machina isn't about technological anxiety. "The anxiety in this film is much more directed at the humans," director Alex Garland tells NPR's Audie Cornish. "It was more in defense of artificial intelligence."

Garland tackled the zombie apocalypse as the writer behind the film 28 Days Later. In Ex Machina - his first film as director - he introduces us to Ava, a creation that is part woman and part machine. There's no hiding that Ava is a machine - but a very, very smart one.

"It's almost like a sort of post-Turing test," Garland says, referring to the test of whether or not a human can tell when they are interacting with a machine. Traditionally the Turing test was a blind one: "The machine would be on the other side of a closed door ... and there'd be a bunch of controls and if the human was tricked into believing they were interacting with another human rather than a machine, then the test was deemed to have been passed."

But the test in Ex Machina is different. "The machine is presented clearly as a machine," Garland explains. "There's no attempt to hide that it might be a machine. And it's really just a test to see if the machine has sentience or a humanlike consciousness."

Ex Machina raises questions about how we define consciousness, and how our instincts about consciousness may mislead us. And it also recasts what the face of artificial intelligence might look like. Garland explains that he used the film's sound design to give a "slightly nursery" quality to the character. It's "intended to present Ava the machine as having a kind of innocence, a sort of undamaged, untarnished quality," he says.

Interview Highlights
On the way Ava's machinery is not hidden
The trick of the film, the way that the film intends to work is to present something which is unambiguously a machine and then gradually remove your sense of Ava being a machine, even while you continue to see her being that way. And the sound design is a key part of that. You can hear ... the sounds of the bits of machinery moving, which aren't specified. They're not quite gears and cogs and pistons, they're something slightly odder than that. And there's also this pulse which is not dissimilar in some respects to a heartbeat, although it isn't a heartbeat.

So the first time she appears, there's no doubt about her machine status. Large parts of her body are transparent and you can see through them. ... Around [her] torso section there's a very, very light mesh which follows the contours of her human form. Hopefully that starts to sort of introduce the more humanlike aspects of her in a sort of physical representation or a visual one. And they're all designed to give a sense of life, but a sense of life which is other in some way.
On tech-billionaire Nathan who defies the "geeky villain" stereotype
He's arrogant, essentially by virtue of the fact that he's incredibly intelligent and powerful. And in [the tech] world, you do encounter people like that. They truly are extremely intelligent and those guys really are smart and you just need to kind of accept that, you know? ...

He's also playing a kind of meta-game the whole time. ... Are you seeing what this guy's actually like? Or are you seeing a presentation that he is giving of himself in a knowing way ... in order to present himself as predatory, misogynistic, physically intimidating, threatening? ...

This guy is arrogant and powerful and probably, let's say, aware about that geeky image. ... And if you look at these guys, often they are sort of fighting against that. It looks like they spend a lot of time in the gym, and they are kind of buff and they're adopting alpha personas, I guess, which they didn't used to have.
On how he got interested in artificial intelligence
I just got very interested in the area of artificial intelligence and, in particular, how it relates to human consciousness because it's about what we value about each other. It's primarily our minds, you know, that's what we interact with and it's what we respect about each other. ... And I could see that there was a lot of anxiety floating around about A.I.s. And I wanted to address it partly because I thought it was misplaced. ...

I think there's a sense in which we feel that we don't understand how our cellphones and our laptops work ... but those things seem to understand a lot about us. Now that's not really about artificial intelligence, it's about tech paranoia.

A lot of the anxiety doesn't come from any real situation that A.I.s are about to take us over or the world is about to change because of A.I.s in any fundamental kind of way - not at the moment at any rate. It's got more to do with big tech companies and the Internet and search engines and social media and that kind of thing. I think there's a sense in which we feel that we don't understand how our cellphones and our laptops work ... but those things seem to understand a lot about us. Now that's not really about artificial intelligence, it's about tech paranoia. So somewhere in this I think I'm trying to look at that, too.

But I think the other thing I was interested in was the way tech companies present themselves. So Oscar Isaac's character Nathan talks in this very kind of familiar, pal-y way. He uses the word "dude" and "bro" a lot. And I felt that this was sometimes how tech companies present themselves to us. They're kind of like our friends. They say, "Hey pal, hey dude," like we're kind of mates, you know, "I'm not really a big tech company, I'm actually your friend and we're hanging out sort of at a bar or at the beach and we're sort of part of each other's lifestyle, but at the same time I'm going to take a lot of money off you and I'm going to take all of your data and rifle through your address book" and that kind of thing.

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More Fear Of Human Intelligence Than Artificial Intelligence In 'Ex Machina'

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Unlike most films about artificial intelligence, Ex Machina isn't about technological anxiety. "The anxiety in this film is much more directed at the humans," director Alex Garland tells NPR's Audie Cornish. "It was more in defense of artificial intelligence." Garland tackled the zombie apocalypse as the writer behind the film 28 Days Later.