Oscar Isaac credited as playing...
Nathan
- Nathan: One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction.
- Caleb: I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
- Nathan: There you go again, Mr. Quotable.
- Caleb: There you go again. It's not my quote. It's what Oppenheimer said after he made...
- Nathan, Caleb: ...the atomic bomb.
- Nathan: Yeah, I know what it is, dude.
- Caleb: Did you program her to flirt with me?
- Nathan: If I did, would that be cheating?
- Caleb: Wouldn't it?
- Nathan: Caleb, what's your type?
- Caleb: Of girl?
- Nathan: No, salad dressing. Yeah, of girl; what's your type of girl? You know what, don't even answer that. Let's say its black chicks. Okay, that's your thing. For the sake of argument, that's your thing, okay? Why is that your thing? Because you did a detailed analysis of all racial types and you cross-referenced that analysis with a points-based system? No! You're just attracted to black chicks. A consequence of accumulated external stimuli that you probably didn't even register as they registered with you.
- Caleb: Did you program her to like me, or not?
- Nathan: I programmed her to be heterosexual, just like you were programmed to be heterosexual.
- Caleb: Nobody programmed me to be straight.
- Nathan: You decided to be straight? Please! Of course you were programmed, by nature or nurture or both and to be honest, Caleb, you're starting to annoy me now because this is your insecurity talking, this is not your intellect.
- Nathan: [points to painting] You know this guy, right?
- Caleb: Jackson Pollock.
- Nathan: Jackson Pollock. That's right. The drip painter. Okay. He let his mind go blank, and his hand go where it wanted. Not deliberate, not random. Some place in between. They called it automatic art. Let's make this like Star Trek, okay? Engage intellect.
- Caleb: Excuse me?
- Nathan: I'm Kirk. Your head's the warp drive. Engage intellect. What if Pollock had reversed the challenge. What if instead of making art without thinking, he said, "You know what? I can't paint anything, unless I know exactly why I'm doing it." What would have happened?
- Caleb: He never would have made a single mark.
- Nathan: Yes! You see, there's my guy, there's my buddy, who thinks before he opens his mouth. He never would have made a single mark.
- Nathan: The challenge is not to act automatically. It's to find an action that is not automatic. From painting, to breathing, to talking, to fucking. To falling in love...
- Nathan: And for the record, Ava's not pretending to like you. And her flirting isn't an algorithm to fake you out. You're the first man she's met that isn't me. And I'm like her dad, right? Can you blame her for getting a crush on you?
- Nathan: Over the next few days you're going to be the human component in a Turing test.
- Caleb: Holy shit!
- Nathan: Yeah, that's right, Caleb. You got it. Because if the test is passed, you are dead center of the greatest scientific event in the history of man.
- Caleb: If you've created a conscious machine, it's not the history of man. That's the history of gods.
- Nathan: It's funny. You know. No matter how rich you get, shit goes wrong. You can't insulate yourself from it. I used to think it was death and taxes you couldn't avoid, but it's actually death and shit.
- 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.
- Nathan: You know, I wrote down that other line you came up with. The one about how if I've invented a machine with consciousness, I'm not a man, I'm a God.
- Caleb: I don't think that's exactly what I...
- Nathan: I just thought, "Fuck, man, that is so good." When we get to tell the story, you know? I turned to Caleb and he looked up at me and he said, "You're not a man, you're a God."
- Caleb: Yeah, but I didn't say that.
- 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: The good deeds a man has done defends him. The good deeds a man has done defends him. The good deeds a man has done... defends him.
- 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?"