About Griffin Brown

I’m Griffin Brown, and I am a senior at GHS in our AI class. Outside of school and my academic interests, I participate in many hobbies and extracurricular activities. I love to run, play basketball, and Sail, as well as be a member of an Indie Rock Band that plays around the area, and participate in the GHS Green Club. Next year, I will be attending Bowdoin College, where I plan to double major in biology and Spanish, while participating in Division III outdoor/indoor track and Cross-Country. I am deeply interested in how AI might be incorporated into the rest of my academic career and how it may expand into the fields I plan to join, both as a tool and as a potentially destructive force.

This week in AI, we spent most of our time watching Alex Garland's 2014 film Ex Machina. We were immersed in Caleb Smith’s world, where he wins a contest to spend a week at the estate of his “genius” boss, Nathan Bateman. Nathan had created their universe's Google at the age of 13 and had now created a human-like AI. Nathan tasked Caleb with performing a Turing test on this AI system. In class, we discussed what this meant: The Turing test is a measure of machine intelligence that determines if a computer can exhibit behavior indistinguishable from a human. Without spoiling the rest of the movie (I strongly recommend that you watch!) Caleb and Nathan come to the conclusion that the artificial intelligence created is far more self-aware and manipulative than either of them imagined.

After watching the movie, we learned that perhaps the real Turing test was on the viewer or even Caleb, to see if we would resonate or feel bad for a “machine.” Along with that, we learned about the different theories on human intelligence, because how can we define artificial intelligence without understanding our own. One of the most popular theories on consciousness (IIT) suggests that conscious experience is irreducible to its parts and arises from a system's ability to exert cause-and-effect power upon itself. This means that consciousness is not emergent, but an inherent, intrinsic property of physical matter organized in specific and recurrent ways.

This week's learning culminated in a Socratic seminar where many of these ideas were expanded and debated. We discussed whether we would attend this retreat, the critiques on artificial intelligence and human intelligence, and most importantly, the future implications AI has on our lives. Most, if not all, of us admitted to “failing” the Turing test and empathizing with the AI even though we knew she was a machine.

Watching the film and the rest of the learning this week truly put AI’s possibly dangerous expansion into perspective. It ultimately made us reflect on the following questions: What would co-existing in a world with AI look like, and what if the people we thought were recognized as human were really AI systems?