What is the last movie you saw? and rate it.

I also saw "ex machina" that bounty mentioned. I resisted watching this earlier since I had enough of AI with "Chappie", however, this movie appears to me to be very anti-AI. The story is about a rich inventor who wanted to test his latest robot built to be a seductive female on an unattached male in his company. He programmed the robot to try to escape by tricking a male to help her. He would consider his robot to pass his modified version of the "Turing test" if the male were fooled by her and tried to help her escape. The inventor expected the robot to fool the male and she did, but he did not expect her to actually escape.

The movie got me thinking about the idea of fooling someone. The Turing test rests on a belief that if a simulation can fool enough people then it really has what it has fooled people into believing it does have which in this case is consciousness. If one thinks about this in terms of scientific theories one could say that all of these theories are simulations of reality. Some of them are useful. Some are not so useful. If one is fooled by a scientific theory then one forgets that the theory is a simulation or model and starts believing that reality is just like the simulation. That is where the problem with belief in scientific models or simulations comes in. Once one believes the simulation is reality one starts acting as if it were reality.

In the case of this movie, both the inventor and the male he used to test his robot not only knew the theory of strong artificial intelligence, they believed it. That was their downfall. They saw the world full of deterministic-random machines and it was only a matter of time before someone would create the conscious deterministic-random machine. Someone who did not believe in strong AI, would not likely have ended up in the situation these two guys did.

Score: 8/10

Yes/No, Bounty and all

One of my favorite films about machines and roboters.
Metropolis by Fritz Lang:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eBGHMfw4fo

20/10 (some missing scenes though!)

I just watched that, Danik. It has a nice theme: "The mediator between head and hands must be the heart." In the documentary "I AM" one of the people interviewed, Rollin McCraty, mentioned that the heart sends more signals to the brain than the brain sends back to it. Also, Ava, the robot in "ex machina" had a brain, but not a heart.

I've heard of "Metropolis" before, but this was the first time I saw it. The experience is kind of like reading a graphic novel.

Maybe one can say that it is a precursor of the graphic novel. But what really delights me it that today I can find most of the famous old movies in the net. Some time ago one had to go to the cinema or buy the DVD to watch them.

When young I would have needed to go to a cinema to see a movie. Now they can be viewed on YouTube as you mention. I used to use a slide rule to do multiplication. Now there are Jupyter notebooks. Being able to build technology around electromagnetism makes that possible.

I've been reading more of McCraty's work on the "energetic heart" since watching Shadyac's "I am". His theory is also linked to electromagnetism.

Thinking more about those robots, I assume we all believe some theories about reality which then influence the way we behave. The heartless, brain-centered algorithmic robots will need to be replaced with something subtler if they are going to fool more than true believers. At the moment such robots can't make real choices and I don't think it is possible for them to make a choice. They are forced to follow whatever their programming tells them is optimal to do. That makes them rational and they are better at being rational than we are. However, someone has to make a choice and tell them what to do whether it is the inventor telling his Machine-Man to incite a riot or telling Ava she should use certain manipulative techniques to escape from the laboratory and drain her energy source watching people on a busy street.

I find it also interesting that in Metropolis the robot was centered in the heart beating. In ex machina, it was a brain that symbolized Ava's supposed ability to simulate us.

To get back to comedy, I watched "Sausage Party" last night: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sausage_party/

There is a lot of crude humor in here and the level of stupidity is pretty high (or low depending on one's perspective). It is also a cartoon which allows things to get even grosser. Anyway, it is a story about food in a grocery story that are trying to find the meaning of life. They currently believe that when they are purchased they go to paradise. They find out that isn't what happens and then they have a rebellion. They kill all the people in the store and then they find out that they aren't even real because they are cartoons and that freaks them out some more but by that time one of them invented a way for them (as simulations) to merge with their more real counterparts.

It did make me realize that if we were simulations that's how we would act, like cartoons.

Score: 7/10

The Salesman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZceCIM0PLg

Watched the film yesterday. Tense, excelent acting, the movie has got a well deserved Oscar nomination. A bit too long.

9,5/10,00

The Salesman sounds interesting. I should show up somewhere.

I just finished watching "The Great Gilly Hopkins": https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the..._hopkins_2016/ A twelve year teenager who was abandoned cracks after harming others. To make a long story short, she grows a heart.

Score: 10/10

I also saw "Masterminds": https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/masterminds_2016

This is supposedly based on a true story. To please a girl he likes an employee of a armored car company steals 17 million dollars and hides out in Mexico. His supposed girl friend starts feeling sorry for him and warns him that the mastermind who got most of the money and planned the robbery is enjoying himself and has sent someone out to kill him. Score: 10/10

Mulholland Drive, widely regarded as David Lynch's magnum opus. It was great, though I still prefer Blue Velvet.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by YesNo

The Salesman sounds interesting. I should show up somewhere.

I just finished watching "The Great Gilly Hopkins": https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the..._hopkins_2016/ A twelve year teenager who was abandoned cracks after harming others. To make a long story short, she grows a heart.

Score: 10/10

I also saw "Masterminds": https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/masterminds_2016

This is supposedly based on a true story. To please a girl he likes an employee of a armored car company steals 17 million dollars and hides out in Mexico. His supposed girl friend starts feeling sorry for him and warns him that the mastermind who got most of the money and planned the robbery is enjoying himself and has sent someone out to kill him. Score: 10/10

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The Salesman should not be difficult to find as it is an Oscar nominee. But it isn´t a comedy. It is very human though but one leaves the cinema with a heavy heart.

I should be able to find The Salesman. The people in the trailer didn't look very happy. I should probably select more dramas. One genre I avoid is horror movies.

I picked up an old Oscar movie to watch tonight "How Green Was My Valley": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Gr..._Valley_(film) I saw another film directed by John Ford about a year ago called "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", however, I thought Dorothy Johnson's short story was better.

It´s not an actual horror movie. It might be a film about the horror of urban unprotectness in our times of social negative feeling.
It relates to at least two American art works:
The Dead of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller
Psycho, by Alfred Hitchcock

I'll give it a try. I thought it was more of a drama than a horror movie anyway. The horror movies that bother me have monsters popping up when I least want to see them. Of course, the music cues that they are coming and I can partially cover my eyes.

No certainly not the ugly plastic monsters you mean.
It is a real situation. The Iranian films I have watched so far use to be very realistic.
And I think you are joking:I can´t imagine you covering your eyes because of some plastic monsters, even if some studios deserve the Oscar if there is an ugliness contest! :wink5:
I think you will like it!

I couldn't find "The Salesman" in the library but perhaps it is too early for it to be out in disk format. I'll keep it on my to-watch list. It does look interesting.

Rather than "How Green Was My Valley", I watched a science fiction movie "Morgan": https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/morgan_2016/

It looks like Rotten Tomatoes and I were in agreement. My score was 3/10. Their scores weren't much better.

The story did not convince me that people would act the way they did in this movie. I could not imagine an egotistical shrink insisting he be unprotected when interviewing Morgan after her wounding someone. The robot sent out to terminate Morgan did not convince me that she was not a robot from the beginning. The people who lost their weapons before they fired a shot at Morgan also seemed unrealistic.

So, forget about the movie, but just look at the concept of a genetically engineered human with superpowers and emotions. The emotions are no problem. This is a human being and conscious as such. The superpowers coming from modifying DNA or something mysterious in the human is what requires questioning whether that is realistic enough to fantasize about in science fiction. Its possibility rests on a belief that our humanity can be reduced to genes which we can manipulate. Is that realistic? The first proof that such a thing is possible would be to find a cure for cancer based on genetic modification. Until we have that, these stories are fairy tales.

One good thing about Morgan is that she is not an AI robot. She has a heart and so consciousness is not an issue. No one in their right mind wants a silicon AI robot to be conscious. We want to send such machines to explore places humans should not go like Mars or other bodies in the solar system. Or we want them to drive us around in cars. We don't want them to make choices on their own. We want them to follow their programming rationally.