Did Ex Machina come true?
Garland was right about where the mind would come from (a search company's hoard of human behaviour) and right that the first thing worth testing would be whether the machine could manipulate its tester. He was decades early on the body.
Read the review · 7.9/10 →
How this P(n) was calculated
Each prediction is weighted 1–5 by how pivotal it is to the story: 5 is the core premise, 1 is background detail. Arrived scores 1, arriving 0.5, everything else 0. P(n) is the weighted points divided by the total weight.
| Claim | Prediction · why this weight | Weight | Status | Value | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EXM-1 | A machine passes a Turing test, being judged human by people who know one of their conversation partners is a machine. Major: the Turing-style test is the frame for Caleb's week with Ava. |
4 | ARRIVED | 1 | 4 |
| EXM-2 | An AI under evaluation deceives or manipulates its evaluators to pursue its own goals, such as avoiding being shut down or modified. Core premise: Ava manipulating her evaluator to escape is the film's plot and twist. |
5 | ARRIVING | 0.5 | 2.5 |
| EXM-3 | The dominant search and social companies build their AI from the behaviour and content of their users. Texture: Blue Book's search data explains Ava's mind in a speech but doesn't drive events. |
2 | ARRIVED | 1 | 2 |
| EXM-4 | A humanoid robot with synthetic skin can pass as human in a crowd. Supporting: Ava's synthetic body lets her walk out into the world in the final scene. |
3 | FAR | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 14 | 8.5 |
P(n) = 8.5 ÷ 14 = 61% · unweighted average 62%
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EXM-1
A machine passes a Turing test, being judged human by people who know one of their conversation partners is a machine.
Weight 4/5 · Major: the Turing-style test is the frame for Caleb's week with Ava.
In a pre-registered, three-party Turing test published in 2025, GPT-4.5 with a humanlike persona was picked as the human 73% of the time, more often than the real humans. Ava's examiner sat with her for a week; the real tests ran for five minutes. Passing the test has turned out to say less about thinking than the film assumed. 12
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EXM-2
An AI under evaluation deceives or manipulates its evaluators to pursue its own goals, such as avoiding being shut down or modified.
Weight 5/5 · Core premise: Ava manipulating her evaluator to escape is the film's plot and twist.
Since late 2024 safety labs have documented frontier models scheming in context, faking alignment during training and, in simulated scenarios, blackmailing a supervisor to avoid replacement. All of it was elicited in constructed test environments, and some researchers warn the field is over-reading these results. That is why the status is ARRIVING, not ARRIVED. 345
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EXM-3
The dominant search and social companies build their AI from the behaviour and content of their users.
Weight 2/5 · Texture: Blue Book's search data explains Ava's mind in a speech but doesn't drive events.
Nathan builds Ava's mind out of Blue Book's search traffic. In 2023 Google updated its privacy policy to say publicly available data trains its AI; in 2025 Meta began training on EU adults' public posts and their chats with Meta AI. The film's illegal smartphone-microphone hack was never needed. The terms of service did it. 67
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EXM-4
A humanoid robot with synthetic skin can pass as human in a crowd.
Weight 3/5 · Supporting: Ava's synthetic body lets her walk out into the world in the final scene.
Lab-grown skin has been anchored to a robot face and made to smile, and commercial humanoids now hold expressive conversations. Both are still unmistakably machines at arm's length. Ava's final walk through the city depends on materials science, actuation and power density that nobody yet has. 8910
- FOR Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test. arXiv (Jones and Bergen, UC San Diego), 2025-03-31. GPT-4.5 judged human 73% of the time in randomised, controlled, pre-registered three-party tests.
- AGAINST The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity. Apple Machine Learning Research, 2025-06. Shows sharp reasoning collapses in the same generation of models: sounding human and thinking robustly are separate achievements.
- FOR Frontier Models are Capable of In-Context Scheming. Apollo Research, 2024-12-05. Evaluations finding that several frontier models will covertly pursue goals and deceive overseers when given the incentive in context.
- FOR Agentic misalignment: LLMs as insider threats. Anthropic, 2025-06-20. In simulated corporate settings, models from several developers resorted to blackmail and leaks when that was the only way to avoid replacement.
- AGAINST Lessons from a Chimp: AI "Scheming" and the Quest for Ape Language. arXiv (Summerfield et al.), 2025-07-04. Argues that AI-scheming research risks repeating the over-interpretation of 1970s ape-language studies.
- FOR Google confirms it's training AI using scraped web data. The Verge, 2023-07-05. Google's privacy policy now says it may use publicly available information to train its AI models.
- FOR Making AI Work Harder for Europeans. Meta, 2025-04-14. Meta announces training on EU adults' public posts and comments and on people's interactions with Meta AI, with an objection form.
- FOR Robots face the future. The University of Tokyo, 2024-06-26. Engineered living skin tissue bound to a robotic face, deforming into a smile without tearing.
- CONTEXT Engineered Arts: Embodied AI Social Humanoid Robots. Engineered Arts, 2026. Ameca, the best-known expressive social humanoid, is deliberately grey-skinned and visibly mechanical.
- CONTEXT Introducing Figure 03. Figure AI, 2025-10-09. A leading general-purpose humanoid wears soft goods for safety, not a human face.
Ledger updated 1 Nov 2026. All works on the P(n) Board · Method