As someone born shortly after the invention of LSTM (programmers know what I'm talking about :) who spend A LOT of time pondering what's going on in the computers and watched this movie in the heyday of deep learning, I find it quite intriguing and thought-provoking. That being said, this movie has two major holes in its plot.
The first is about computer systems. A question that stayed in my mind throughout the movie is, WHERE IS THE OPERATING SYSTEM? But now that I'm writing this review, it occurs to me that perhaps the better question is, WHERE IS THE CPU? Memory and I/O buses are explicitly mentioned in the movie, and I suppose the maze-like structures are disks. But where is CPU? And where is the OS that schedules all the programs?
The second problem is about artificial intelligence. In this regard, the movie made a quite common layman mistake, by confusing computers with artificial intelligence. Many si-fi movies assume that AI systems just at some point gain consciousness, grew out of control, and take over. But that's not the case. Computers are not uninterpretable and that easy to become a killing robot. What's really uninterpretable is deep learning models (which, of course, were none-existent when the movie was made). The knowledge, or intelligence, are stored as billions of parameters in neural networks. In the end, these parameters are just floating point values stored like anything else in computers' memory or disk. What we do not understand is how these parameters, when combined together, demonstrate signs of intelligence. So a truly faithful depiction of AI programs would be far more bizarre than this movie. But the movie is not to be blamed for not correctly foreseeing the future.
Nonetheless, if there is going to be a sequel in 2020s, I really hope they can consult some computer scientists, and surprise us with some real-world AI systems, like BERT, T5, or GPT!
The first is about computer systems. A question that stayed in my mind throughout the movie is, WHERE IS THE OPERATING SYSTEM? But now that I'm writing this review, it occurs to me that perhaps the better question is, WHERE IS THE CPU? Memory and I/O buses are explicitly mentioned in the movie, and I suppose the maze-like structures are disks. But where is CPU? And where is the OS that schedules all the programs?
The second problem is about artificial intelligence. In this regard, the movie made a quite common layman mistake, by confusing computers with artificial intelligence. Many si-fi movies assume that AI systems just at some point gain consciousness, grew out of control, and take over. But that's not the case. Computers are not uninterpretable and that easy to become a killing robot. What's really uninterpretable is deep learning models (which, of course, were none-existent when the movie was made). The knowledge, or intelligence, are stored as billions of parameters in neural networks. In the end, these parameters are just floating point values stored like anything else in computers' memory or disk. What we do not understand is how these parameters, when combined together, demonstrate signs of intelligence. So a truly faithful depiction of AI programs would be far more bizarre than this movie. But the movie is not to be blamed for not correctly foreseeing the future.
Nonetheless, if there is going to be a sequel in 2020s, I really hope they can consult some computer scientists, and surprise us with some real-world AI systems, like BERT, T5, or GPT!