A few years ago, there was a movie called “Ex Machina,” which told the story of a young man – an employee of a Big Tech company – who wins a company contest to spend a weekend with the company’s reclusive CEO at his remote mountain chalet.
It turns out that the contest was rigged, and that the young man was selected because he was deemed the perfect employee to participate in a test of the company’s new female robot. The CEO wanted to find out of the young man would be able to detect the difference between the robot and real women, even (as I recall) after engaging in sexual activity.
It’s been a few years since I saw the movie, but it became a guessing game of who (if any) of the women at the chalet were real women, and who were the robots. Rivalries and schemes emerged amongst the women/robots. Needless to say, things didn’t go according to plan, but I’ll leave it at that so as not to spoil it.
It now seems that we might be approaching the day when the dilemmas described in that movie become real-life issues, and this involves not just the questions raised by advanced robotics but the idea of truth itself. and how it can be falsified, imitated, and manipulated. And what happens to basic human trust when people no longer know what is real and what is fake? Once again, the topic of “conspiracy theories” enters the picture.
