Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science
Guests: Alex Garland
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript · 00:00–09:07
The following is a conversation with Alex Garland,
writer and director of many imaginative
and philosophical films,
from the dreamlike exploration of human self-destruction
in the movie "Annihilation"
to the deep questions of consciousness and intelligence
raised in the movie "Ex Machina,"
which to me is one of the greatest movies
in artificial intelligence ever made.
I'm releasing this podcast to coincide
with the release of his new series called "Devs"
that will premiere this Thursday, March 5th on Hulu
as part of FX on Hulu.
It explores many of the themes this very podcast is about,
from quantum mechanics to artificial life to simulation
to the modern nature of power in the tech world.
I got a chance to watch a preview and loved it.
The acting is great.
Nick Offerman especially is incredible in it.
The cinematography is beautiful
and the philosophical and scientific ideas explored
are profound.
And for me as an engineer and scientist,
were just fun to see brought to life.
For example, if you watch the trailer
for the series carefully,
you'll see there's a programmer with a Russian accent
looking at a screen with Python-like code on it
that appears to be using a library
that interfaces with a quantum computer.
This attention to technical detail
on several levels is impressive.
And one of the reasons I'm a big fan
of how Alex weaves science and philosophy together
in his work.
Meeting Alex for me was unlikely,
but it was life-changing
in ways I may only be able to articulate in a few years.
Just as meeting Spotmania Boston Dynamics
for the first time planted a seed of an idea in my mind,
so did meeting Alex Garland.
He's humble, curious, intelligent,
and to me, an inspiration.
Plus, he's just really a fun person to talk with
about the biggest possible questions in our universe.
This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube,
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And now, here's my conversation with Alex Garland.
You described the world inside the shimmer
in the movie "Annihilation" as dreamlike,
meaning that it's internally consistent,
but detached from reality.
That leads me to ask,
do you think, a philosophical question, I apologize,
do you think we might be living in a dream
or in a simulation, like the kind that the shimmer creates?
We, human beings, here today.
- Yeah.
I wanna sort of separate that out into two things.
Yes, I think we're living in a dream of sorts.
No, I don't think we're living in a simulation.
I think we're living on a planet
with a very thin layer of atmosphere,
and the planet is in a very large space,
and the space is full of other planets and stars
and quasars and stuff like that.
And I don't think those physical objects,
I don't think the matter in that universe is simulated.
I think it's there.
We are definitely, or,
it's a whole problem with saying definitely,
but in my opinion, I'll just go back to that.
I think it seems very like we're living in a dream state.
I'm pretty sure we are.
And I think that's just to do with the nature
of how we experience the world.
We experience it in a subjective way.
And the thing I've learned most
as I've got older in some respects
is the degree to which reality is counterintuitive,
and that the things that are presented to us as objective
turn out not to be objective,
and quantum mechanics is full of that kind of thing,
but actually just day-to-day life
is full of that kind of thing as well.
So my understanding of the way the brain works
is you get some information to hit your optic nerve,
and then your brain makes its best guess
about what it's seeing or what it's saying it's seeing.
It may or may not be an accurate best guess.
It might be an inaccurate best guess.
And that gap, the best guess gap,
means that we are essentially living in a subjective state,
which means that we're in a dream state.
So I think you could enlarge on the dream state
in all sorts of ways.
So yes, dream state, no simulation
would be where I'd come down.
- Going further, deeper into that direction,
you've also described that world as psychedelia.
So on that topic, I'm curious about that world.
On the topic of psychedelic drugs,
do you see those kinds of chemicals
that modify our perception
as a distortion of our perception of reality
or a window into another reality?
- No, I think what I'd be saying
is that we live in a distorted reality,
and then those kinds of drugs
give us a different kind of distorted--
- Different perspective.
- Yeah, exactly, they just give an alternate distortion.
And I think that what they really do
is they give a distorted perception,
which is a little bit more allied to daydreams
or unconscious interests.
So if for some reason
you're feeling unconsciously anxious at that moment
and you take a psychedelic drug,
you'll have a more pronounced unpleasant experience.
And if you're feeling very calm or happy,
you might have a good time.
But yeah, so if I'm saying we're starting from a premise,
our starting point is we were already
in the slightly psychedelic state,
what those drugs do is help you go further down an avenue
or maybe a slightly different avenue, but that's all.
- So in that movie, "Annihilation,"
the shimmer, this alternate dreamlike state
is created by, I believe, perhaps, an alien entity.
Of course, everything's up to interpretation, right?
But do you think there's, in our world, in our universe,
do you think there's intelligent life out there?
And if so, how different is it from us humans?
- Well, one of the things I was trying to do in "Annihilation"
was to offer up a form of alien life
that was actually alien.
Because it would often seem to me
that in the way we would represent aliens
in books or cinema or television
or any one of the sort of storytelling mediums
is we would always give them very human-like qualities.
So they wanted to teach us about galactic federations
or they wanted to eat us or they wanted our resources
like our water or they want to enslave us
or whatever it happens to be.
But all of these are incredibly human-like motivations.
And I was interested in the idea of an alien
that was not in any way like us.
It didn't share.
Maybe it had a completely different clock speed.
Maybe its way, so we're talking about,
we're looking at each other,
we're getting information, light hits our optic nerve,
our brain makes the best guess of what we're doing.
Sometimes it's right,
something, you know, the thing we were talking about before.
What if this alien doesn't have an optic nerve?
Maybe its way of encountering the space it's in
is wholly different.
Maybe it has a different relationship with gravity.
- The basic laws of physics it operates under
might be fundamentally different.
It could be a different time scale and so on.
- Yeah, or it could be the same laws,
§02Transcript · 09:10–19:06
it could be the same underlying laws of physics.
You know, it's a machine created
or it's a creature created in a quantum mechanical way.
It just ends up in a very, very different place
to the one we end up in.
So part of the preoccupation with annihilation
was to come up with an alien that was really alien
and didn't give us,
and it didn't give us and we didn't give it
any kind of easy connection between human and the alien.
Because I think it was to do with the idea
that you could have an alien that landed on this planet
that wouldn't even know we were here.
And we might only glancingly know it was here.
There'd just be this strange point
where the Venn diagrams connected
where we could sense each other or something like that.
- So in the movie, first of all, incredibly original view
of what an alien life would be.
And it's in that sense, it's a huge success.
Let's go inside your imagination.
Did the alien, that alien entity know anything
about humans when it landed?
- No.
- So the idea is you're basically an alien,
life is trying to reach out to anything
that might be able to hear its mechanism of communication
or was it simply, was it just basically their biologist
exploring different kinds of stuff that you can--
- But you see, this is the interesting thing is
as soon as you say their biologist,
you've done the thing of attributing
human type motivations to it.
I was trying to free myself from anything like that.
So all sorts of questions you might answer
about this notional alien, I wouldn't be able to answer
because I don't know what it was.
(laughing)
Or how it worked.
I had some rough ideas, like it had a very, very,
very slow clock speed.
And I thought maybe the way it is interacting
with this environment is a little bit like the way
an octopus will change its color forms
around the space that it's in.
So it's sort of reacting to what it's in to an extent,
but the reason it's reacting in that way is indeterminate.
But its clock speed was slower than our human life
clock speed, but it's faster than evolution.
- Faster than our--
- Than our evolution.
- Yeah, given the four billion years it took us to get here,
then yes, maybe it started at eight.
- If you look at the human civilization
as a single organism.
In that sense, this evolution could be us.
The evolution of living organisms on Earth
could be just a single organism
and it's kind of, that's its life,
is the evolution process that eventually will lead
to probably the heat death of the universe
or something before that.
I mean, that's just an incredible idea.
So you almost don't know, you've created something
that you don't even know how it works.
- Yeah, because any time I tried to look into
how it might work, I would then inevitably be attaching
my kind of thought processes into it.
And I wanted to try and put a bubble around it
where I was saying, no, this is alien
in its most alien form.
I have no real point of contact.
- So unfortunately, I can't talk to Stanley Kubrick.
So I'm really fortunate to get a chance to talk to you.
On this particular notion, I'd like to ask it
a bunch of different ways and we'll explore
it in different ways, but do you ever consider
human imagination, your imagination,
as a window into a possible future
and that what you're doing, you're putting
that imagination on paper as a writer
and then on screen as a director
and that plants the seeds in the minds
of millions of future and current scientists.
And so your imagination, you putting it down
actually makes it a reality.
So it's almost like a first step of the scientific method.
Like you imagining what's possible
in your new series with Ex Machina
is actually inspiring thousands of 12 year olds,
millions of scientists and actually creating
the future you've imagined.
- Well, all I could say is that from my point of view,
it's almost exactly the reverse
because I see that pretty much everything I do
is a reaction to what scientists are doing.
I'm an interested lay person and I feel,
this individual, I feel that the most interesting area
that humans are involved in is science.
I think art is very, very interesting,
but the most interesting is science.
And science is in a weird place because maybe
around the time Newton was alive,
if a very, very interested lay person said to themselves,
I want to really understand what Newton is saying
about the way the world works,
with a few years of dedicated thinking,
they would be able to understand
the sort of principles he was laying out.
And I don't think that's true anymore.
I think that's stopped being true now.
So I'm a pretty smart guy.
And if I said to myself, I want to really, really understand
what is currently the state of quantum mechanics
or string theory or any of the sort of branching areas of it,
I wouldn't be able to,
I'd be intellectually incapable of doing it
because to work in those fields at the moment
is a bit like being an athlete.
I suspect you need to start when you're 12.
And if you start in your mid twenties,
start trying to understand in your mid twenties,
then you're just never gonna catch up.
That's the way it feels to me.
So what I do is I try to make myself open.
So the people that you're implying,
maybe I would influence,
to me, it's exactly the other way around.
These people are strongly influencing me.
I'm thinking they're doing something fascinating.
I'm concentrating and working as hard as I can
to try and understand the implications of what they say.
And in some ways, often what I'm trying to do
is disseminate their ideas
into a means by which it can enter a public conversation.
So Ex Machina contains lots of name checks,
all sorts of existing thought experiments,
shadows on Plato's cave
and Mary in the black and white room
and all sorts of different long standing thought processes
about sentience or consciousness or subjectivity or gender
or whatever it happens to be.
And then I'm trying to marshal that into a narrative
to say, look, this stuff is interesting
and it's also relevant and this is my best shot at it.
So I'm the one being influenced in my construction.
- That's fascinating.
Of course, you would say that
because you're not even aware of your own.
That's probably what Kubrick would say too, right?
Is in describing why how 9,000 is created
the way how 9,000 is created
is you're just studying what's...
But the reality when the specifics of the knowledge
passes through your imagination,
I would argue that you're incorrect
in thinking that you're just disseminating knowledge.
That the very act of your imagination
consuming that science,
it creates something, it creates the next step,
potentially creates the next step.
I certainly think that's true with 2001 A Space Odyssey.
I think at its best, if it fails--
- It's true of that.
Yeah, it's true of that, definitely.
(laughing)
- At its best, it plans something, it's hard to describe,
but it inspires the next generation
and it could be field dependent.
So your new series is more a connection to physics,
quantum physics, quantum mechanics, quantum computing,
and yet Ex Machina is more artificial intelligence.
I know more about AI.
My sense that AI is much earlier
in the depth of its understanding.
I would argue nobody understands anything
to the depth that physicists do about physics.
In AI, nobody understands AI.
That there is a lot of importance and role for imagination.
Which I think, we're in that,
or Freud imagined the subconscious,
we're in that stage of AI,
where there's a lot of imagination needed
and thinking outside the box.
- Yeah, it's interesting.
The spread of discussions and the spread of anxieties
that exist about AI fascinate me.
The way in which some people seem terrified about it.
Whilst also pursuing it.
And I've never shared that fear about AI personally.
But the way in which it agitates people
and also the people who it agitates,
I find kind of fascinating.
- Are you afraid?
Are you excited?
Are you sad by the possibility?
Let's take the existential risk of artificial intelligence,
by the possibility an artificial intelligence system
becomes our offspring and makes us obsolete.
- I mean, it's a huge subject to talk about, I suppose.
§03Transcript · 19:10–28:00
But one of the things I think is that humans
are actually very experienced at creating new life forms.
Because that's why you and I are both here.
And it's why everyone on the planet is here.
And so something in the process of having a living thing
that exists that didn't exist previously
is very much encoded into the structures of our life
and the structures of our societies.
It doesn't mean we always get it right,
but it does mean we've learnt quite a lot about that.
We've learnt quite a lot about what the dangers are
of allowing things to be unchecked.
And it's why we then create systems of checks and balances
in our government and so on and so forth.
I mean, that's not to say...
The other thing is it seems like
there's all sorts of things that you could put
into a machine that you would not be...
So with us, we sort of roughly try to give some rules
to live by, and some of us then live by those rules
and some don't.
And with a machine, it feels like
you could enforce those things.
So partly because of our previous experience
and partly because of the different nature of a machine,
I just don't feel anxious about it.
More, I just see all the good that...
Broadly speaking, the good that can come from it.
But that's just where I am on that anxiety spectrum.
- There's a sadness.
So we as humans give birth to other humans, right?
But then there's generations,
and there's often in the older generation a sadness
about what the world has become now.
I mean, that's kind of...
- Yeah, there is, but there's a counterpoint as well,
which is that most parents would wish
for a better life for their children.
So there may be a regret about some things about the past,
but broadly speaking, what people really want
is that things will be better
for the future generations, not worse.
And so, and then it's a question
about what constitutes a future generation.
A future generation could involve people.
It also could involve machines,
and it could involve a sort of cross-pollinated version
of the two or any...
But none of those things make me feel anxious.
- It doesn't give you anxiety.
It doesn't excite you?
Like anything that's new?
- It does.
Not anything that's new.
I don't think, for example, I've got...
My anxieties relate to things like social media.
So I've got plenty of anxieties about that.
- Which is also driven by artificial intelligence
in the sense that there's too much information
to be able to...
An algorithm has to filter that information
and present to you.
So ultimately, the algorithm, a simple,
oftentimes simple algorithm is controlling
the flow of information on social media.
So that's another form of AI.
- But at least my sense of it, I might be wrong,
but my sense of it is that the algorithms
have an either conscious or unconscious bias,
which is created by the people
who are making the algorithms
and sort of delineating the areas
to which those algorithms are gonna lean.
And so, for example,
the kind of thing I'd be worried about
is that it hasn't been thought about enough
how dangerous it is to allow algorithms
to create echo chambers, say.
But that doesn't seem to me to be about the AI
or the algorithm.
It's the naivety of the people
who are constructing the algorithms to do that thing,
if you see what I mean.
- Yes.
So in your new series, "Devs,"
then we could speak more broadly.
Let's talk about the people constructing those algorithms,
which in our modern society, Silicon Valley,
those algorithms happen to be a source
of a lot of income because of advertisements.
So let me ask sort of a question about those people.
Are current concerns and failures on social media,
their naivety, I can't pronounce that word well,
are they naive?
Are they,
I use that word carefully, but evil in intent
or misaligned in intent?
I think that's a, do they mean well
and just have a unintended consequence?
Or is there something dark in them
that results in them creating a company,
results in that super competitive drive to be successful?
And those are the people
that will end up controlling the algorithms.
- At a guess, I'd say there are instances
of all those things.
So sometimes I think it's naivety.
Sometimes I think it's extremely dark.
And sometimes I think people are not being naive or dark.
And then in those instances,
they're sometimes generating things that are very benign
and other times generating things
that despite their best intentions are not very benign.
It's something, I think the reason why I don't get anxious
about AI in terms of,
or at least AIs that have,
I don't know, a relationship with,
some sort of relationship with humans
is that I think that's the stuff we're quite well equipped
to understand how to mitigate.
The problem is issues that relate to AI
actually to the power of humans or the wealth of humans.
And that's where it's dangerous here and now.
So what I see,
I'll tell you what I sometimes feel about Silicon Valley
is that it's like Wall Street in the '80s.
It's rabidly capitalistic,
absolutely rabidly capitalistic,
and it's rabidly greedy.
But whereas in the '80s,
the sense one had of Wall Street
was that these people kind of knew they were sharks
and in a way relished in being sharks
and dressed in sharp suits
and kind of lorded over other people
and felt good about doing it.
Silicon Valley has managed to hide
its voracious Wall Street-like capitalism
behind hipster T-shirts
and cool cafes in the place where they set up there.
And so that obfuscates what's really going on.
And what's really going on
is the absolute voracious pursuit of money and power.
So that's where it gets shaky for me.
- So that veneer,
and you explore that brilliantly,
that veneer of virtue that Silicon Valley has.
- Which they believe themselves, I'm sure.
- Boy. - A long time.
- So let me, okay.
I hope to be one of those people.
And I believe that.
So as maybe a devil's advocate term
poorly used in this case,
what if some of them really are trying
to build a better world?
I can't-- - I'm sure,
I think some of them are.
I think I've spoken to ones who I believe in their heart
feel they're building a better world.
- Are they not able to in a sense?
- No, they may or may not be.
But it's just as a zone
with a lot of bullshit flying about.
And there's also another thing which is,
this actually goes back to,
I always thought about some sports
that later turned out to be corrupt
in the way that the sport,
like who won the boxing match
or how a football match got thrown
or cricket match or whatever happened to be.
And I used to think, well, look,
if there's a lot of money,
and there really is a lot of money,
people stand to make millions or even billions,
you will find corruption that's gonna happen.
So it's in the nature
of its voracious appetite
that some people will be corrupt
and some people will exploit
and some people will exploit
whilst thinking they're doing something good.
But there are also people who I think are very, very smart
and very benign and actually very self-aware.
And so I'm not trying to,
I'm not trying to wipe out
the motivations of this entire area.
But I do, there are people in that world
who scare the hell out of me.
Yeah, sure.
- Yeah, I'm a little bit naive in that,
like I don't care at all about money.
And so I'm...
- You might be one of the good guys.
- Yeah, but so the thought is,
but I don't have money.
So my thought is if you give me a billion dollars,
I would, it would change nothing
and I would spend it right away
§04Transcript · 28:01–37:32
on investing it right back and creating a good world.
But your intuition is that billion,
there's something about that money
that maybe slowly corrupts the people around you.
There's somebody gets in that corrupts your soul,
the way you view the world.
- Money does corrupt, we know that.
But there's a different sort of problem
aside from just the money corrupts,
you know, thing that we're familiar with
in throughout history.
And it's more about the sense of reinforcement
an individual gets, which is so,
it effectively works like the reason I earned all this money
and so much more money than anyone else
is because I'm very gifted.
I'm actually a bit smarter than they are,
or I'm a lot smarter than they are.
And I can see the future in a way they can't.
And maybe some of those people are not particularly smart,
they're very lucky, or they're very talented entrepreneurs.
And there's a difference between it.
So in other words, the acquisition of the money and power
can suddenly start to feel like evidence of virtue.
And it's not evidence of virtue,
it might be evidence of completely different things.
- As brilliantly put, yeah.
Yeah, as brilliantly put like,
so I think one of the fundamental drivers
of my current morality,
let me just represent nerds in general.
Of all kinds, is constant self doubt.
And the signals, I'm very sensitive to signals
from people that tell me I'm doing the wrong thing.
But when there's a huge inflow of money,
you just put it brilliantly
that that could become an overpowering signal
that everything you do is right.
And so your moral compass can just get thrown off.
- Yeah, and that is not contained to Silicon Valley,
that's across the board.
- In general, yeah.
Like I said, I'm from the Soviet Union,
the current president is convinced,
I believe actually he wants to do really good
by the country and by the world,
but his moral clock may be, or compass may be off because--
- Yeah, I mean, it's the interesting thing about evil,
which is that I think most people
who do spectacularly evil things think themselves
they're doing really good things.
They're not there thinking,
I am a sort of incarnation of Satan,
they're thinking, yeah, I've seen a way to fix the world
and everyone else is wrong, here I go.
- In fact, I'm having a fascinating conversation
with a historian of Stalin, and he took power,
he actually got more power
than almost any person in history.
And he wanted, he didn't want power,
he just wanted, he truly,
and this is what people don't realize,
he truly believed that communism
will make for a better world.
- Absolutely.
- And he wanted power,
he wanted to destroy the competition
to make sure that we actually make communism work
in the Soviet Union and then spread it across the world.
He was trying to do good.
- I think it's typically the case
that that's what people think they're doing.
And I think that, but you don't need to go to Stalin,
I mean, Stalin, I think Stalin probably got pretty crazy,
but actually that's another part of it,
which is that the other thing that comes
from being convinced of your own virtue
is that then you stop listening to the modifiers around you.
And that tends to drive people crazy.
It's other people that keep us sane.
And if you stop listening to them,
I think you go a bit mad, that also happens.
- That's funny, disagreement keeps us sane.
To jump back for an entire generation of AI researchers,
2001, a space odyssey, put an image,
the idea of human level, superhuman level intelligence
into their mind.
Do you ever, sort of jumping back to Ex Machina
and talk a little bit about that,
do you ever consider the audience of people
who build the systems, the roboticist,
the scientists that build the systems
based on the stories you create?
Which I would argue, I mean, there's literally
most of the top researchers about 40, 50 years old and plus,
that's their favorite movie, 2001, a space odyssey.
And it really is in their work,
their idea of what ethics is, of what is the target,
the hope, the dangers of AI is that movie.
Do you ever consider the impact on those researchers
when you create the work you do?
- Certainly not with Ex Machina in relation to 2001,
because I'm not sure, I mean, I'd be pleased if there was,
but I'm not sure in a way there isn't a fundamental
discussion of issues to do with AI
that isn't already and better dealt with by 2001.
2001 does a very, very good account
of the way in which an AI might think
and also potential issues with the way the AI might think.
And also then a separate question about whether the AI
is malevolent or benevolent.
And 2001 doesn't really, it's a slightly odd thing
to be making a film when you know there's a preexisting film
which is not a really superb job.
- But there's questions of consciousness, embodiment,
and also the same kinds of questions.
'Cause those are my two favorite AI movies.
So can you compare "Hal 9000" and "Ava",
"Hal 9000" from "2001 Space Odyssey"
and "Ava" from Ex Machina, in your view,
from a philosophical perspective--
- But they've got different goals.
The two AIs have completely different goals.
I think that's really the difference.
So in some respects, Ex Machina took as a premise,
how do you assess whether something else has consciousness?
So it was a version of the Turing test,
except instead of having the machine hidden,
you put the machine in plain sight
in the way that we are in plain sight of each other
and say, now assess the consciousness.
And the way it was illustrating
the way in which you'd assess
the state of consciousness of a machine
is exactly the same way we assess
the state of consciousness of each other.
And in exactly the same way that, in a funny way,
your sense of my consciousness
is actually based primarily on your own consciousness.
That is also then true with the machine.
And so it was actually about how much
of the sense of consciousness is a projection
rather than something that consciousness
is actually containing.
- And "Half-Plato's Cave," I mean, you really explored,
you could argue that how sort of "Space Odyssey"
explores idea of the Turing test for intelligence.
No, not test, there's no test,
but it's more focused on intelligence.
And Ex Machina kind of goes around intelligence
and says the consciousness of the human to human,
human to robot interaction is more interesting,
more important, at least the focus
of that particular movie.
- Yeah, it's about the interior state
and what constitutes the interior state
and how do we know it's there.
And actually, in that respect,
Ex Machina is as much about consciousness in general
as it is to do specifically with machine consciousness.
And it's also interesting, you know that thing
you started asking about, the dream state,
and I was saying, well, I think we're all in a dream state
because we're all in a subjective state.
One of the things that I became aware of with Ex Machina
is that the way in which people reacted to the film
was very based on what they took into the film.
So many people thought Ex Machina was the tale
of a sort of evil robot who murders two men and escapes
and she has no empathy, for example,
because she's a machine.
Whereas I felt, no, she was a conscious being
with a consciousness different from mine,
but so what, imprisoned and made a bunch of value judgments
about how to get out of that box.
And there's a moment which it sort of slightly bugs me,
but nobody ever has noticed it and it's years after,
so I might as well say it now,
which is that after Ava has escaped, she crosses a room
and as she's crossing a room,
this is just before she leaves the building,
she looks over her shoulder and she smiles.
And I thought after all the conversation about tests,
in a way, the best indication you could have
of the interior state of someone
is if they are not being observed
and they smile about something,
where they're smiling for themselves.
And that, to me, was evidence of Ava's true sentience,
whatever that sentience was.
- Oh, that's really interesting.
We don't get to observe Ava much
or something like a smile in any context
except through interaction, trying to convince others
that she's conscious, that's beautiful.
- Exactly, yeah.
But it was a small, in a funny way,
I think maybe people saw it as an evil smile,
like, ha, you know, I fooled them.
But actually, it was just a smile.
§05Transcript · 37:34–47:05
And I thought, well, in the end,
after all the conversations about the test,
that was the answer to the test and then off she goes.
- So if we align, if we just to linger a little bit longer
on Hal and Ava, do you think in terms of motivation,
what was Hal's motivation?
Is Hal good or evil?
Is Ava good or evil?
- Ava's good, in my opinion.
And Hal is neutral because I don't think Hal
is presented as having a sophisticated emotional life.
He has a set of paradigms,
which is that the mission needs to be completed.
I mean, it's a version of the paperclip.
- Yeah. - You know.
- The idea that it's a super intelligent machine
but it's just performed a particular task.
- Yeah. - And in doing that task,
may destroy everybody on earth
or may achieve undesirable effects for us humans.
- Precisely, yeah.
- But what if, okay.
- At the very end, he says something like,
"I'm afraid, Dave."
But that may be he is on some level experiencing fear
or it may be this is the terms in which it would be wise
to stop someone from doing the thing they're doing.
If you see what I mean.
- Yes, absolutely.
So actually, that's funny.
So that's such a small,
short exploration of consciousness that I'm afraid.
And then you just with ex machina say,
"Okay, we're gonna magnify that part
and then minimize the other part."
So that's a good way to sort of compare the two.
But if you could just use your imagination
and if Ava sort of, I don't know,
ran the, was president of the United States.
So had some power.
So what kind of world would she want to create?
If we, as you kind of say, good.
And there is a sense that she has a really,
like there's a desire for a better human to human interaction
human to robot interaction in her.
But what kind of world do you think she would create
with that desire?
- So that's a really,
that's a very interesting question that.
I'm gonna approach it slightly obliquely,
which is that if a friend of yours got stabbed in a mugging
and you then felt very angry
at the person who'd done the stabbing,
but then you learned that it was a 15 year old
and the 15 year old,
both their parents were addicted to crystal meth
and the kid had been addicted since he was 10
and he really never had any hope in the world.
And he'd been driven crazy by his upbringing.
And did the stabbing that would hugely modify.
And it would also make you wary about that kid
then becoming president of America.
And Ava has had a very,
very distorted introduction into the world.
So although there's nothing as it were organically
within Ava that would lean her towards badness,
it's not that robots or sentient robots are bad.
She did not, her arrival into the world
was being imprisoned by humans.
So I'm not sure she'd be a great president.
- Yeah, the trajectory through which she arrived
at her moral views have some dark elements.
- But I like Ava, personally, I like Ava.
- Would you vote for her?
- I'm having difficulty finding anyone to vote for
in my country or if I lived here in yours.
- I, I, um.
- So that's a yes, I guess, because the competition.
- She could easily do a better job
than any of the people we've got around at the moment.
- Okay.
- I'd vote for her over Boris Johnson.
(laughing)
- So what is a good test of consciousness?
Just, we talk about consciousness a little bit more.
If something appears conscious, is it conscious?
You mentioned the smile,
which is, seems to be something done.
I mean, that's a really good indication
because it's a tree falling in the forest
with nobody there to hear it.
But does the appearance from a robotics perspective
of consciousness mean consciousness to you?
- No, I don't think you could say that fully
because I think you could then easily
have a thought experiment which said,
we will create something which we know is not conscious
but is going to give a very, very good account
of seeming conscious.
And so, and also it would be a particularly bad test
where humans are involved because humans are so quick
to project sentience into things that don't have sentience.
So someone could have their computer playing up
and feel as if their computer is being malevolent to them
when it clearly isn't.
And so of all the things to judge consciousness,
us, we're empathy machines.
- So the flip side of that, the argument there
is because we just attribute consciousness
to everything almost, anthropomorphize everything,
including Roombas, that maybe consciousness is not real.
That we just attribute consciousness to each other.
So you have a sense that there is something really special
going on in our mind that makes us unique
and gives us subjective experience.
There's something very interesting going on in our minds.
I'm slightly worried about the word special
because it gets a bit, it nudges towards metaphysics
and maybe even magic.
I mean, in some ways, something magic-like,
which I don't think is there at all.
- I mean, if you think about,
so there's an idea called panpsychism
that says consciousness is in everything.
- Yeah, I don't buy that, I don't buy that.
Yeah, so the idea that there is a thing
that it would be like to be the sun.
- Yes. - Yeah, no.
I don't buy that.
I think that consciousness is a thing.
My sort of broad modification is that usually
the more I find out about things,
the more illusory our instinct is
and is leading us into a different direction
about what that thing actually is.
That happens, it seems to me, in modern science,
that happens a hell of a lot.
Whether it's to do with even how big or small things are.
So my sense is that consciousness is a thing,
but it isn't quite the thing,
or maybe very different from the thing
that we instinctively think it is.
So it's there, it's very interesting,
but we may be in sort of quite fundamentally
misunderstanding it for reasons that are based on intuition.
- So I have to ask,
this is kind of an interesting question.
The Ex Machina, for many people, including myself,
is one of the greatest AI films ever made.
- Wow. - It's number two for me.
- Thanks.
Yeah, it's definitely not number one.
If it was number one, I'd really have to, anyway, yeah.
- Whenever you grow up with something, right?
You may have grew up with something, it's in the blood.
But there's, one of the things that people bring up,
and can't please everyone, including myself,
this is what I first reacted to the film,
is the idea of the lone genius.
This is the criticism that people say,
sort of, me as an AI researcher,
I'm trying to create what Nathan is trying to do.
So there's a brilliant series called "Chernobyl."
- Yes, it's fantastic, absolutely spectacular.
- I mean, they got so many things brilliantly right.
But one of the things, again, the criticism there--
- Yeah, they conflated lots of people into one.
- Into one character that represents all nuclear scientists,
Ioana Komiak.
It's a composite character that presents all scientists.
Is this what you were,
is this the way you were thinking about that,
or is it just simplifies the storytelling?
How do you think about the lone genius?
- Well, I'd say this.
The series I'm doing at the moment is a critique
in part of the lone genius concept.
So yes, I'm sort of oppositional,
and either agnostic or atheistic about that as a concept.
I mean, not entirely, you know.
Whether lone, lone is the right word, broadly isolated,
but Newton clearly exists in a sort of bubble of himself
in some respects, so does Shakespeare.
- So do you think we would have an iPhone
without Steve Jobs?
I mean, how much contribution from a genius?
- Well, no, but Steve Jobs clearly isn't a lone genius,
because there's too many other people
in the sort of superstructure around him
who are absolutely fundamental to that journey.
- But you're saying Newton, but that's a scientific,
so there's an engineering element to building Ava.
- But just to say, what Ex Machina is really,
it's a thought experiment.
I mean, so it's a construction
of putting four people in a house.
Nothing about Ex Machina adds up in all sorts of ways,
in as much as who built the machine parts,
did the people building the machine parts
know what they were creating, and how did they get there?
§06Transcript · 47:08–56:12
And it's a thought experiment.
So it doesn't stand up to scrutiny of that sort.
- I don't think it's actually that interesting
of a question, but it's brought up so often
that I had to ask it, because that's exactly
how I felt after a while.
There's something about, there was almost a,
like I watched your movie the first time,
at least for the first little while, in a defensive way.
Like how dare this person try to step into the AI space
and try to beat Kubrick.
That's the way I was thinking,
'cause it comes off as a movie that really is going
after the deep fundamental questions about AI.
So there's a kind of a, nerds do this,
I guess, automatically searching for the flaws.
And I just--
- I do exactly the same.
- I think in "Annihilation" and the other movie,
I was able to free myself from that much quicker.
That it is a thought experiment.
There's, you know, who cares if there's batteries
that don't run out, right?
Those kinds of questions.
That's the whole point.
But it's nevertheless something I wanted to bring up.
- Yeah, it's a fair thing to bring up.
For me, you hit on the lone genius thing.
For me, it was actually, people always said,
"Hex Machina makes this big leap
in terms of where AI has got to,
and also what AI would look like if it got to that point."
There's another one, which is just robotics.
I mean, look at the way Ava walks around a room.
It's like, forget it, building that.
That's also got to be a very, very long way off.
And if you did get there,
would it look anything like that?
It's a thought experiment.
- Actually, I disagree with you.
I think the way Isabella Arena, Alicia Vikander,
brilliant actress, actor, that moves around,
we're very far away from creating that,
but the way she moves around
is exactly the definition of perfection for a roboticist.
It's smooth and efficient.
So it is where we want to get, I believe.
Like, I think, so I hang out
with a lot of humanoid robotics people.
They love elegant, smooth motion like that.
That's their dream.
So the way she moved is actually what I believe
they would dream for a robot to move.
It might not be that useful to move that sort of that way,
but that is the definition of perfection
in terms of movement.
Drawing inspiration from real life.
So for devs, for ex machina,
look at characters like Elon Musk.
What do you think about the various big technological efforts
of Elon Musk and others like him
that he's involved with, such as Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink?
Do you see any of that technology
potentially defining the future worlds
you create in your work?
So Tesla is automation, SpaceX is space exploration,
Neuralink is brain machine interface,
somehow a merger of biological and electric systems.
- I'm, in a way, I'm influenced by that
almost by definition because that's the world I live in,
and this is the thing that's happening in that world.
And I also feel supportive of it.
So I think amongst various things,
Elon Musk has done, I'm almost sure he's done
a very, very good thing with Tesla for all of us.
It's really kicked all the other car manufacturers
in the face, it's kicked the fossil fuel industry
in the face, and they needed kicking in the face,
and he's done it.
So, and so that's the world he's part of creating,
and I live in that world.
Just bought a Tesla, in fact.
And so does that play into whatever I then make?
In some ways it does, partly because I try to be a writer
who quite often filmmakers are in some ways fixated
on the films they grew up with,
and they sort of remake those films in some ways.
I've always tried to avoid that.
And so I look to the real world to get inspiration,
and as much as possible, sort of by living, I think.
And so, yeah, I'm sure.
- Which of the directions do you find most exciting?
- Space travel.
- Space travel.
So you haven't really explored space travel in your work.
You've said something like if you had unlimited amount
of money, I think I read it at AMA,
that you would make a multi-year series of space wars
or something like that.
So what is it that excites you about space exploration?
- Well, because if we have any sort of long-term future,
it's that.
It just simply is that.
If energy and matter are linked up
in the way we think they're linked up,
we'll run out if we don't move.
So we gotta move.
But also, how can we not?
It's built into us to do it or die trying.
I was on Easter Island a few months ago,
which is, as I'm sure you know,
in the middle of the Pacific
and difficult for people to have got to,
but they got there.
And I did think a lot about the way those boats
must have set out into something like space.
It was the ocean.
And how sort of fundamental that was to the way we are.
And it's the one that most excites me
because it's the one I want most to happen.
It's the thing, it's the place
where we could get to as humans.
Like in a way, I could live with us never really unlocking,
fully unlocking the nature of consciousness.
I'd like to know, I'm really curious.
But if we never leave the solar system
and if we never get further out into this galaxy,
or maybe even galaxies beyond our galaxy,
that would, that feels sad to me
because it's so limiting.
- Yeah, there's something hopeful and beautiful
about reaching out, any kind of exploration,
reaching out across earth centuries ago
and then reaching out into space.
So what do you think about colonization of Mars?
So go to Mars.
Does that excite you, the idea of a human being
stepping foot on Mars?
- It does.
It absolutely does.
But in terms of what would really excite me,
it would be leaving the solar system.
In as much as that I just think,
I think we already know quite a lot about Mars.
But yes, listen, if it happened, that would be,
I hope I see it in my lifetime.
I really hope I see it in my lifetime.
So it would be a wonderful thing.
- Without giving anything away,
but the series begins with the use of quantum computers.
The new series does, begins with the use
of quantum computers to simulate basic living organisms.
Or actually, I don't know if it's quantum computers
they use, but basic living organisms
simulated on a screen.
It's a really cool kind of demo.
- Yeah, that's right.
They're using, yes, they are using a quantum computer
to simulate a nematode, yeah.
- So returning to our discussion of simulation
or thinking of the universe as a computer,
do you think the universe is deterministic?
Is there a free will?
- So with the qualification of what do I know?
'Cause I'm a layman, right?
Lay person, but--
- With big imagination.
- Thanks.
With that qualification, yeah,
I think the universe is deterministic
and I see absolutely, I cannot see
how free will fits into that.
So yes, deterministic, no free will.
That would be my position.
- And how does that make you feel?
- It partly makes me feel that it's exactly in keeping
with the way these things tend to work out,
which is that we have an incredibly strong sense
that we do have free will.
And just as we have an incredibly strong sense
that time is a constant
and turns out probably not to be the case,
or definitely in the case of time.
The problem I always have with free will is that it gets,
I can never seem to find the place
where it is supposed to reside.
- And yet you explore--
- Just a bit of very, very,
but we have something we can call free will,
but it's not the thing that we think it is.
- But free will, so do you, what we call free will is just--
- Is what we call it is the illusion of it.
- It's a subjective experience of the illusion.
- Yeah, which is a useful thing to have.
And it partly comes down to,
although we live in a deterministic universe,
our brains are not very well equipped
to fully determine the deterministic universe,
so we're constantly surprised
and feel like we're making snap decisions
§07Transcript · 56:15–1:05:42
based on imperfect information,
so that feels a lot like free will.
It just isn't.
Would be my, that's my guess.
- So in that sense, your sort of sense
is that you can unroll the universe forward or backward
and you will see the same thing.
And you, I mean, that notion--
- Yeah, sort of, sort of, but yeah, sorry, go ahead.
- I mean, that notion is a bit uncomfortable to think about
that it's, you can roll it back and forward and--
- Well, if you were able to do it,
it would certainly have to be a quantum computer,
something that worked in a quantum mechanical way
in order to understand a quantum mechanical system, I guess.
But--
- And so that unrolling, there might be a multiverse thing
where there's a bunch of branching--
- Well, exactly, because it wouldn't follow
that every time you roll it back or forward,
you'd get exactly the same result.
- Which is another thing that's hard to wrap my mind around.
So-- - Yeah, but that, yes,
but essentially what you just described, that,
the yes forwards and yes backwards,
but you might get a slightly different result,
or a very different result.
- Or very different.
- Along the same lines, you've explored
some really deep scientific ideas in this new series.
And I mean, just in general, you're unafraid
to ground yourself in some of the most amazing
scientific ideas of our time.
What are the things you've learned,
or ideas you find beautiful and mysterious
about quantum mechanics, multiverse, string theory,
quantum computing that you've learned?
- Well, I would have to say every single thing I've learned
is beautiful, and one of the motivators for me
is that I think that people tend not to see
scientific thinking as being essentially poetic and lyrical.
But I think that is literally exactly what it is.
And I think the idea of entanglement,
or the idea of superpositions,
or the fact that you could even demonstrate a superposition,
or have a machine that relies on the existence
of superpositions in order to function,
to me is almost indescribably beautiful.
It fills me with awe, it fills me with awe.
And also, it's not just a sort of grand, massive awe,
but it's also delicate.
It's very, very delicate and subtle.
And it has these beautiful nuances in it,
and also these completely paradigm-changing
thoughts and truths.
So it's as good as it gets, as far as I can tell.
So broadly, everything.
That doesn't mean I believe everything I read
in quantum physics, because obviously,
a lot of the interpretations are completely in conflict
with each other, and who knows whether string theory
will turn out to be a good description or not.
But the beauty in it, it seems undeniable.
And I do wish people more readily understood
how beautiful and poetic science is, I would say.
- Science is poetry.
In terms of quantum computing being used
to simulate things, or just in general,
the idea of simulating small parts of our world,
which actually current physicists are really excited
about simulating small quantum mechanical systems
on quantum computers, but scaling that up
to something bigger, like simulating life forms.
How do you think, what are the possible trajectories
of that going wrong or going right,
if you unroll that into the future?
- Well, if a bit like Ava and her robotics,
you park the sheer complexity of what you're trying to do.
The issues are, I think it will have a profound,
if you were able to have a machine that was able
to project forwards and backwards accurately,
it would in an empirical way show,
it would demonstrate that you don't have free will.
So the first thing that would happen is people would have
to really take on a very, very different idea
of what they were.
The thing that they truly, truly believe they are,
they are not.
And so that, I suspect, would be very, very disturbing
to a lot of people.
- Do you think that has a positive or negative effect
on society, the realization that you are not,
you cannot control your actions, essentially, I guess,
is the way that could be interpreted?
- Yeah, although in some ways,
we instinctively understand that already,
because in the example I gave you of the kid
in the stabbing, we would all understand
that that kid was not really fully in control
of their actions.
So it's not an idea that's entirely alien to us.
But-- - I don't know
we understand that.
I think there's a bunch of people who see the world that way,
but not everybody.
- Yes, true.
Of course, true.
But what this machine would do is prove it beyond any doubt,
because someone would say,
"Well, I don't believe that's true."
And then you'd predict,
"Well, in 10 seconds, you're gonna do this."
And they'd say, "No, I'm not."
And then they'd do it, and then determinism
would have played its part.
Or something like that.
But actually the exact terms of that thought experiment
probably wouldn't play out.
But still broadly speaking,
you could predict something happening in another room,
sort of unseen, I suppose,
that foreknowledge would not allow you to affect.
So what effect would that have?
I think people would find it very disturbing.
But then after they'd got over their sense
of being disturbed, which by the way,
I don't even think you need a machine
to take this idea on board.
But after they'd got over that,
they'd still understand that even though
I have no free will and my actions are in effect
already determined, I still feel things.
I still care about stuff.
I remember my daughter saying to me,
she'd got hold of the idea that my view of the universe
made it meaningless.
And she said, "Well, then it's meaningless."
And I said, "Well, I can prove it's not meaningless
"because you mean something to me
"and I mean something to you.
"So it's not completely meaningless
"because there is a bit of meaning
"contained within this space."
And so with a lack of free will space,
you could think, well, this robs me of everything I am.
And then you'd say, well, no, it doesn't
because you still like eating cheeseburgers
and you still like going to see the movies.
And so how big a difference does it really make?
But I think initially people would find it very disturbing.
I think that what would come if you could really unlock
with a determinism machine everything,
there'd be this wonderful wisdom that would come from it.
And I'd rather have that than not.
- So that's a really good example of a technology
revealing to us humans something fundamental
about our world, about our society.
So it's almost this creation is helping us
understand ourselves.
The thing you said about artificial intelligence.
So what do you think us creating something like Ava
will help us understand about ourselves?
How will that change society?
- Well, I would hope it would teach us some humility.
Humans are very big on exceptionalism.
America is constantly proclaiming itself
to be the greatest nation on earth,
which it may feel like that if you're an American,
but it may not feel like that if you're from Finland,
because there's all sorts of things
you dearly love about Finland.
And exceptionalism is usually bullshit.
Probably not always.
If we both sat here, we could find a good example
of something that isn't, but as a rule of thumb.
And what it would do is it would teach us some humility
and about, actually often that's what science does
in a funny way.
It makes us more and more interesting,
but it makes us a smaller and smaller part
of the thing that's interesting.
And I don't mind that humility at all.
I don't think it's a bad thing.
Our excesses don't tend to come from humility.
Our excesses come from the opposite, megalomania and stuff.
We tend to think of consciousness
as having some form of exceptionalism attached to it.
I suspect if we ever unravel it,
it will turn out to be less than we thought in a way.
And perhaps your very own exceptionalist assertion
earlier on in our conversation that consciousness
is something belongs to us humans,
or not humans, but living organisms,
maybe you will one day find out
that consciousness is in everything.
And that will humble you.
- If that was true, it would certainly humble me.
Although maybe, almost maybe, I don't know.
I don't know what effect that would have.
I sort of, I mean, my understanding of that principle
§08Transcript · 1:05:47–1:11:02
is along the lines of say,
that an electron has a preferred state,
or it may or may not pass through a bit of glass.
It may reflect off or it may go through
or something like that.
And so that feels as if a choice has been made.
But if I'm going down the fully deterministic route,
I would say there's just an underlying determinism
that has defined that, that has defined the preferred state
or the reflection or non-reflection.
But look, yeah, you're right.
If it turned out that there was a thing
that it was like to be the sun,
then I'd be amazed and humbled.
And I'd be happy to be both.
That sounds pretty cool.
- And you'll say the same thing
as you said to your daughter,
but it's nevertheless feels something like to be me.
And that's pretty damn good.
So Kubrick created many masterpieces,
including "The Shining," "Doctor Strangelove,"
"Clockwork Orange."
But to me, he will be remembered, I think,
to many 100 years from now for 2001, "A Space Odyssey."
I would say that's his greatest film.
- I agree.
- You are incredibly humble.
I've listened to a bunch of your interviews
and I really appreciate that you're humble
in your creative efforts and your work.
But if I were to force you a gunpoint.
- Do you have a gun?
- You don't know that, the mystery.
To imagine 100 years out into the future,
what will Alex Garland be remembered for
from something you've created already
or feel you may feel somewhere deep inside
you may still create?
- Well, okay, well, I'll take the question
in the spirit it was asked, but very generous.
- Gunpoint.
- Yeah.
What I try to do, so therefore what I hope,
yeah, if I'm remembered what I might be remembered for
is as someone who participates in a conversation.
And I think that often what happens
is people don't participate in conversations,
they make proclamations, they make statements,
and people can either react against the statement
or can fall in line behind it.
And I don't like that.
So I want to be part of a conversation.
I take as a sort of basic principle,
I think I take lots of my cues from science,
but one of the best ones it seems to me
is that when a scientist has something proved wrong
that they previously believed in,
they then have to abandon that position.
So I'd like to be someone who is allied
to that sort of thinking.
So part of an exchange of ideas.
And the exchange of ideas for me is something like
people in your world show me things
about how the world works.
And then I say, this is how I feel about what you've told me.
And then other people can react to that.
And it's not to say this is how the world is.
It's just to say it is interesting
to think about the world in this way.
- And the conversation is one of the things
I'm really hopeful about in your works.
The conversation you're having is with the viewer
in the sense that you're bringing back
you and several others, but you very much so
sort of intellectual depth to cinema,
to now series,
sort of allowing film to be something that,
yeah, sparks a conversation, is a conversation,
lets people think, allows them to think.
- But also it's very important for me
that if that conversation is gonna be a good conversation,
what that must involve is that someone like you
who understands AI, and I imagine understands
a lot about quantum mechanics,
if they then watch the narrative feels,
yes, this is a fair account.
So it is a worthy addition to the conversation.
That for me is hugely important.
I'm not interested in getting that stuff wrong.
I'm only interested in trying to get it right.
- Alex, it was truly an honor to talk to you.
I really appreciate it, I really enjoy it.
Thank you so much.
- Thank you, thanks man.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Alex Garland, and thank you
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And now, let me leave you with a question from Ava,
the central artificial intelligence character
in the movie "Ex Machina" that she asked
during her Turing test.
"What will happen to me if I fail your test?"
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Next time.
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