How close are you to accepting that uploading human consciousness into robots is next?

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People need to wake up. AI can give you almost any information you ask it to give you. Once they put that kind of power into a robot with more strength than a human what do you think will happen?

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A search engine cannot have a logical conversation with you and sound exactly like a human while doing it.

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In the film Ex Machina, BlueBook is the dominant, Google-like search engine, created by CEO Nathan Bateman. It serves as the foundation for the AI Ava, with Nathan using the massive, global data set of user searches to understand human thought, behavior, and consciousness to create a "map" of the human mind.

Key Details About BlueBook:

Purpose: Nathan argues that search engines are not just for information, but are actually a map of how people are thinking.

Data Source for AI: The AI, Ava, is built using the enormous "associative trails" and data collected by BlueBook, allowing her to mimic human consciousness.

Design & Role: Designed by Territory Studio, the interface was made to look realistic, representing a near-future version of search technology.

Role in Plot: The protagonist, Caleb, is chosen for the experiment because his personal BlueBook search history indicated he was an empathetic, lonely person with no "digital footprint" in terms of family or a partner.

Source: Google AI Overview.

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One of my favorite details from Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is that Nathan builds his AI from a search engine, BlueBook. (I could, and probably will, write a slew of blog posts about Ex Machina, but for today, it’ll just be this detail about search engines and AI.)

A brief explanation about the importance of search activity to AI is on page 63 of the script:



There’s lots of gold in that excerpt (like the parallel to striking oil and the mention of monetization schemes), but here’s the key:

“[Search engines] were a map of how people were thinking.”

In other words, search does not just produce a single piece of information, it also produces a trail that helped lead us to that information.

Here is an excerpt from a 1996 book by Herbert A. Simon called “The Sciences of the Artificial,” which I recently read for a class on Human-Computer Interaction:

“search processes may be viewed — as they have been in most discussions of problem solving — as processes for seeking a problems solution. But they can be viewed more generally as processes for gathering information about problem structure that will ultimately be valuable in discovering a problem solution. The latter viewpoint is more general than the former in a significant sense, in that it suggests that information obtained along any particular branch of a search tree may be used in many contexts besides the one in which it was generated.”

Sound familiar? To link it to the Ex Machina script directly, Simon suggests that whenever we search for a piece of information, we generate information that is useful outside of that single search. We might call that information “data exhaust,” a favorite concept of Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian (if you need proof, see this WIRED article, or this piece in the American Economic Review).

But this idea of search-as-intelligence goes back even further. Here is another couple of excerpts from another reading in my Human-Computer Interaction class, this one from Vannevar Bush in 1945 (As We May Think, The Atlantic)

“When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard.”

“One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.”

Bush is describing a “memex” machine that would store our paths of information gathering as “associative trails.” Again, as Nathan said in Ex Machina, storing not just what we think but how we think: associations and connections. In a 2012 announcement, Google described these connections as the ingredient that turns “information” into “knowledge.” And that, my friends, is why this particular part of Ex Machina is not as much science fiction as it is reality: Whenever we use Google for web search, our data exhaust generates connections that help train Google’s artificial intelligence systems. By depicting search as a tool for generating knowledge and intelligence, Ex Machina can help us further think about “data dignity,” the ways we might partake in (or abstain from) a more dignified exchange of personal data in the digital economy. Since we are still a long way off from data dignity, I’ll leave you with the following words from Wendell Berry’s poem, the Mad Farmer Liberation Front:

“Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.”

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