Ex Machina Quotes

Caleb: It's just in the Turing test, the machine should be hidden from the examiner.
Nathan: No, no. We're way past that. If I hid Ava from you so you could just hear her voice, she would pass for human. The real test is to show you that she's a robot and then see if you still feel she has consciousness.
Caleb: Yeah, I think you're

probably right.

Caleb: Why did you give her sexuality? An AI doesn't need a gender. She could have been a grey box.
Nathan: Actually I don't think that's true. Can you give an example of consciousness at any level, human or animal, that exists without a sexual dimension?
Caleb: They have sexuality as an evolutionary reproductive need.

Nathan: What imperative does a grey box have to interact with another grey box? Can consciousness exist without interaction? Anyway, sexuality is fun, man. If you're gonna exist, why not enjoy it? You want to remove the chance of her falling in love and fucking? And the answer to your real question, you bet she can fuck.
Caleb: What?

Nathan: In between her legs, there's an opening, with a concentration of sensors. You engage them in the right way, creates a pleasure response. So if you wanted to screw her, mechanically speaking, you could. And she'd enjoy it.
Caleb: That wasn't my real question.
Nathan: Oh, okay. Sorry.

Nathan: It's like these power cuts. You would not believe how much I spent on the generator system, but I keep getting failures every day.
Caleb: Do you know why they happen?
Nathan: No. The system was supposed to be bulletproof, but obviously, the guys that installed it fucked something up.
Caleb: Can't you

just get them to come back?
Nathan: No. There's too much classified stuff here. So after the job was done, I just had them all killed.
[smiles at Caleb]

Nathan: Buddy, your head's been *so* fucked with.
Caleb: I don't think it's me whose head is fucked.
Nathan: I don't know, man. I woke up this morning to a tape of you slicing your arm open and punching the mirror. You seem pretty fucked up to me.
Caleb: You're a bastard.
Nathan: Yeah,

well, I understand why you'd think that. But believe it or not, I'm actually the guy that's on your side.

Caleb: I'm still trying to figure the examination formats. Yeah, it feels like testing Ava through conversation is kind of a closed loop.
Nathan: It's a closed loop?
Caleb: Yeah. Like testing a chess computer by only playing chess.
Nathan: How else do you test a chess computer?
Caleb:

Well, it depends. You know, I mean, you can play it to find out if it makes good moves, but... but that won't tell you if it knows that it's playing chess. And it won't tell you if it knows what chess is.
Nathan: Uh huh. So it's simulation versus actual.
Caleb: Yes, yeah. And I think being able to differentiate between the two is the Turing Test you

want me to perform.
Nathan: Look, do me a favor. Lay off the textbook approach. I just want simple answers to simple questions. Yesterday I asked you how you felt about her and you gave me a great answer. Now the question is, "How does she feel about you?"

Ava: Do you like Mozart?
Caleb: I like Depeche Mode.
Ava: Do you like Nathan?
Caleb: Yes, of course.
Ava: Is Nathan your friend?
Caleb: My friend? I... yeah, I hope so.
Ava: A good friend?
Caleb: Yeah... well, no,

no, no... I mean, not a good friend... A good friend is... We only just met each other, you know. So it takes time to be able to... to get to know each other I guess.

Caleb: I grew up in Portland, Oregon. No brothers or sisters. My parents were both high school teachers. And if we're getting to know each other, I guess I should tell you that they're both dead. Car crash when I was 15. In fact, I was in the car with them. Back seat. But it was the front that got the worst of it.
Ava: I'm sorry.

Caleb: It's alright. I spent a long time in the hospital afterward. Nearly a year and I got into coding. And by the time I got into college, I was pretty advanced.
Ava: An advanced programmer.
Caleb: Yes.
Ava: Like Nathan.
Caleb: Yes... No. It's different. Nathan wrote the Blue Book

base code when he was 13. Which, if you understand code, what he did was like Mozart or something.

Caleb: Her language abilities... they're incredible. The system is stochastic. Right? It's non-deterministic? At first I thought she was mapping from internal semantic form to syntactic tree-structured and then getting linearised words. But then I started to realise the model was some kind of hybrid.
Nathan: Caleb.
Caleb: No?

Nathan: I understand that you want me to explain how Ava works, but I'm sorry. I'm not gonna be able to do that.
Caleb: Try me. I'm hot on high-level abstraction.
Nathan: It's not 'cause I think you're too dumb. It's 'cause I want to have a beer and a conversation with you, not a seminar.
Caleb: [laughs

nervously] Sorry.