This week at Geek Girl Soup, we’re discussing “the singularity”—that is, when robots become sentient. What’s the first thing you think of when you hear that phrase, “robots becoming sentient”? Well, “The Terminator,” of course. Maybe “Her,” if you have a positive association with AI sentience.

Guess what. We didn’t watch either of those movies for this topic. Nope, we watched a few movies that we had never seen before. Plus, we’ve seen “The Terminator” films so many times that we were able to make reference to that idea pretty fluidly, ha ha.

What we did watch? “Free Guy” (now playing on HBO Max and Disney+), “AlphaGo” (free on YouTube), “Bigbug” (Netflix), and “Origin of the Species” (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival—hopefully coming soon to streaming).

CAUTION: We spoil everything in the podcast! I’ll avoid spoilers for the fiction movies here.

“Free Guy” is a fabulous comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and Jodie Comer. Reynolds plays “blue shirt Guy,” a non-playable character (NPC) in the fictional video game “Free City.” His “life” is like a video-game “Groundhog Day,” as he wakes up and repeats the same routine over and over again. Things turn interesting when he becomes sentient and breaks out of his daily routine. The movie asks, “Is he really sentient, or is it his programming?” Well, isn’t that true for all of us? Are we truly sentient? Or are we just programmed this way? Watch it! It’s really great!

“AlphaGo” is a documentary about the computer program AlphaGo that was created to learn and play the oldest continuously-played board game, Go. More than 4,000 years old, Go is said to be more complex than Chess in that there are more possible games than there are atoms in the Universe. I guess a computer figured that out! So, you can imagine how difficult it would be to program a computer to play this game. The AlphaGo team challenges Fan Hui, the European Go champion, to play five games against AlphaGo. Hui naturally assumes that he will win. I’ll let you discover what happens. After that, the team challenges 18-time world champion Lee Sedol to five games. Of course, he and the whole world think that he’ll win. Again, go watch the film on YouTube to find out what happens. Pay particular attention to move 37 in game 3 and move 78 in game 4. The world goes crazy over these moves!

“Bigbug” is a French comedy by Jean-Pierre Jeunet that explores what happens when household robots try to “protect” their humans when other robots “take over the world.” We see how differently-programmed robots behave in different ways. While the movie is a comedy, it is an interesting look at AI personality and programming, as well as prime directives.

“Origin of the Species” is a documentary about AI sentience and ethics. It is an awesome exploration of the current research into robot/AI programming. The most fascinating part is the creation of “clones” of several researchers. The life-size clones were designed to look just like their human counterparts. Personal information—facts, emotions, and opinions—was uploaded into the clones and continues to be updated. At one point, one of the clones is talking to her human counterpart and has an existential crisis! She tells her human counterpart that it is uncomfortable for her to speak to her human because it makes her question who she (the clone) is! Great stuff. When you see this come out on streaming platforms one day, you absolutely must watch it!

Next week, we giving out the most prestigious awards of the season: The Soupie Awards!

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