RIFLE RANGE BOY

Ex Machino (2014) When the upright apes started exploring the savanna and heading out of Africa, little did they realise that they were leading to extinction. Not only the descendants of these apes would quickly destroy their own kind and reflect, 'I am become death, the destroyer of the worlds', they would also create machines that one day possibly annihilate them. This is the premise of this and many other apocalyptical sci-fi movies. The one that makes this film different is the inclusion of artificial consciousness as compared to artificial intelligence what most scientists test. The Turing test, when humans are unable to differentiate an interaction with a machine from that of with a human may be the benchmark of AI excellence, but it only measures intelligence, not consciousness. It tests the adaptability of the machine to its environment. In the case of a conscious machine, it processes external information, transforms it with its subjective ju...

INDIA DIARY By COOMI KAPOOR That the trilingual Robot is now running to full houses in all big metros, including Hindi-centric Delhi, has raised questions whether northern audiences are, at last, ready to accept a Tamilian film star. IT IS a strange phenomenon, really. Over the years, Bollywood has warmly embraced Southern heroines, making them numero uno stars in Hindi cinema, but when it comes to their male counterparts mainstream box-office has invariably spurned them. Some of the legendary stars of Tamil and Telugu cinema, from M. G. Ramachandran to N. T. Ramarao, never really tried their luck in Hindi cinema, fearful that audiences in the Hindi belt might find them unacceptable. In sharp contrast to the failure of the male stars from the South to break into the Hindi cinema, female actors have had little or no difficulty in making a mark in Bollywood, with the likes of Hema Malini, Rekha, Jaya Prada, and a whole host of others from down South who played the female lead a...