Why Sherlock’s finale is actually about AI

Spoilers ahead.

Season 4 finale just aired and while we are all left to pick up the remnants of our broken hearts we might want to take an in dept look at the theme of this last episode.

I say that because behind all the family struggles the central problem of the episode is the relationship between men and a god, or, a superintelligent AI.

Eurus, the last of the Holmes siblings, has abilities beyond everything the writers have ever shown to us: her deductions are quicker and more precise than her brothers’s, she can manipulate almost everyone into doing exactly what she wants (like killing one’s family or disobeying orders from, arguably, the most powerful man in the United Kingdom), and she needs only a couple minutes on the internet to predict terrorists attacks.

She has data analysis skills that scientist all around the globe would kill for.

But this scenario is not new in one area of fiction: science fiction.

The idea came up in a thought experiment devised by Eliezer Yudkowsky, the AI Box experiment.

This experiment highlights the possibility for an intelligent and self-aware AI to better itself to the point of being able to trick humans into letting it escape its “box”, its prison. The usual scenario after the escape is one of destruction for the human race, as the philosopher Nick Bostrom highlights in his book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

The idea is simple: if we create an intelligence superior enough to our own as to be useful in making sense of the enourmous amount of data that our hyper connected world produces, than this intelligence would simply be too umpredictable to be controlled.

If we give this intelligence the chance to better itself, we might awaken something well beyond our comprehension, something that could easily find a way to escape whatever prision we might devise for it.

So let’s compare this hypothetical superintelligent AI to Eurus:

Intelligence beyond human comprehension? check.

Locked up and disconnected from the ouside world? check.

Murderous and unstoppable when given the chance to escape? check.

Eurus might wear human skin, but she’s really an AI locked in an hardrive, or at least, that’s what she seems to be until the last minutes of the episode and the big reveal. The skeleton of this character is that of a apex predator, something that can manipulate its prey in every possible way.

But in the end the smartest human on the planet is still human: she doesn’t want to exterminate her creators, nor to conquer the planet or the galaxy. She wants someone to play with, she’s jealous.

In this aspect Eurus reminds us of another example of an intelligent AI: Ava, the protagonist/antagonist of the film Ex Machina.

In the end the defining feature of both these characters is their ability to show emotions and not their brain power.

And while Ava’s emotions could have simply been a façade, we have no doubt that Eurus emotions were true: the season is centered around the one truly exceptional skill Sherlock possesses: his ability to feel and to be human in the most vulnerable sense, and there’s no reason to doubt that the freedom Eurus wanted was not from some elaborate jail, some disconnected hardrive or some villa deep in a forest.

What Eurus wanted was to escape her own head, but she needed someone else to get in first, she needed someone to save her from the plane, and who better than her emotional big brother?