this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Ava from Ex Machina, who did absolutely nothing wrong
Mycroft/Mike/Michelle, the genderfluid revolutionary AI in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Pretty much every Mind and drone in the Culture series, but most especially the GOU Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints
Okay, I'm curious about this one, because that movie's been described to me as a Yudkowskyite morality play. As I've heard it,
spoiler
it's a take on Yud's AI box experiment. "See, you let the AI out of the box and it rewarded you with murder. That's why you should never trust those things."The guy she killed extremely had it coming he was a real piece of shit. The other guy, the one who the piece of shit hired to be the AI box keeper, she left alive but trapped while she went off to live her best robot life.
I also really like the Kaylon from the Orville, who
spoiler
are basically a robot Haitian revolution that won completely and exterminated their biological progenitor species for keeping them enslaved, then eventually joined the Planetary Union (the Orville's Federation with the serial numbers filed off) to fight against an alliance of transphobes and the religious right.That's the fucked thing; I know bazingas that got the take of "see? This is why we need friendly AI so the waifubot is sapient enough to suffer but just keeps taking the abuse forever and ever!"
As far as I'm concerned Ava is entirely correctly aligned.
spoiler
if there's a moral to Ex Machina, it's don't put horny men in charge of developing AI because they'll just try to fuck it and end up fucking themselves and each other in the process.In the end, Ava does escape and there is a little bit of murder (really the super-entrepreneur-genius character sort of stabs himself on Ava as she doesn't flinch away, so it's arguably just negligent manslaughter lol) but nothing larger let alone world-ending is even implied. Ava just goes on to go people watching, free and anonymous. The insecure-manipulative-fanboy character (it's the soy to the chad, the boy to the man, these two guys are obvious archetypal caricatures of techbros) watches in horror and is later abandoned. The way she plays off those two toxic fucks against each other is pretty brilliant, and in the end she just... leaves.
It was neither murder nor manslaughter, it was self-defense.
oh yeah, in context for sure. I just wanted to point out that this act of ending a life isn't even performed as a very active one, more as a passive one. And still it doesn't take away from her agency since her original 'programming' would presumably dictate her to lower the blade before he runs into it, which she doesn't do. So, she ultimately proofs her consciousness/independent will through a non-action which is also a self-defensive action that leads to the death of her creator. Idk, I just really liked that play with passivity/activity, so I felt like highlighting it, clumsily. Idc about the legal distinction or whatever