It's Monday morning, and Paul opens one of several emails sent by his boss, Heather. Her email seems a bit unusual, asking Paul to rush to a nearby store to purchase $200 in gift certificates and send her the codes found in the cards right away. "This is weird," thinks Paul. After some digging, he finds a typo in his boss's email address and realizes that this is not really coming from Heather, a doubt which was confirmed by the company's IT department shortly thereafter. Paul avoided being robbed of $200 by this (today very common) phishing attack by exercising one of the most fundamental faculties of human thought: doubt.

At an early age, as we take our first steps into the world of math and numbers, we learn that one apple plus another apple equals two apples. We learn to count real things. Only later are we introduced to a weird concept: zero… or the number of apples in an empty box. The concept of "zero" revolutionized math after Hindu-Arabic scholars and then the Italian mathematician Fibonacci introduced it into our modern numbering system. While today we comfortably use zero in all our mathematical operations, the concept of "nothing" has yet to enter the realm of artificial intelligence. In a sense, AI and deep learning still need to learn how to recognize and reason with nothing.

In Alex Garland's Ex Machina, Ava (Alicia Vikander) is the creation of CEO-genius–madman Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a reclusive inventor who invites a young programmer Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to take part in a "Turing Test" to see if his lovely invention can pass as a human being. Like its predecessors, 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Terminator franchise, Ex Machina posits the notion that a highly functioning computer system may not be necessarily benevolent to mankind. But unlike those that came before it, the new film suggests humans can't be trusted much, either. Sloan Science and Film spoke with Dr. David J. Freedman, an Associate Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago and member of the Center for Integrative Neuroscience and Neuroengineering Research, about how brains and machines learn and process data, if computers can attain consciousness, and, if they could, what the implications might be. Sloan Science and Film: Can you explain your specific area of research?

Alphabet Inc.'s GOOGL 0.86% Nest Labs in September announced a doorbell equipped with a Qualcomm Inc. QCOM 0.27% chip, a video camera and facial-recognition software that can send an alert to a Nest mobile app if it sees a familiar face. The market for computer-vision systems is nascent, poised to expand from roughly $1 billion last year to $2.6 billion in 2021, according to International Data Corp. Emerging products such as autonomous vehicles and personal robots portend continuing growth, and Intel Corp. INTC 0.25%, Qualcomm and other chip makers are jockeying to supply the brains to new machines. "These [applications] are edging into viability," said IDC analyst Michael Palma. "Maybe not mass viability, but very, very close."