"Alex Garland’s stylish, slow-burn thriller “Ex Machina,” which had its premiere 10 years ago this week, gave us a 21st-century twist on Nietzsche’s question: Supposing AI is a woman — what then?
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"Alex Garland’s stylish, slow-burn thriller “Ex Machina,” which had its premiere 10 years ago this week, gave us a 21st-century twist on Nietzsche’s question: Supposing AI is a woman — what then?
Garland’s innovation was to discard the traditional Hollywood depiction of AI having a male embodiment — think of the computer Hal in “2001: A Space Odyssey” — and reconstitute it as a femme fatale. Depending on whom you ask, he either queued up a mother lode of vile misogynist tropes or cracked open ethical questions that Hollywood had been studiously avoiding.
The plot of “Ex Machina” is deceptively simple: Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a talented midlevel programmer at a tech company, wins a contest to spend a week at the private wilderness getaway of Nathan (Oscar Isaac), his firm’s brilliant, heavy-boozing tech-bro CEO. When he arrives, Caleb learns he’s actually been brought in to judge a Turing test meant to evaluate the capabilities of Ava (Alicia Vikander), a beautiful robot. As the exam sessions roll forward under Nathan’s surveillance, a chilling thought dawns on Caleb: Ava may have actually achieved self-awareness. In which case, is she essentially being unjustly imprisoned by Nathan? And is Caleb implicated in this barbarity?
These moral scruples were something new. After all, before “Ex Machina,” Hollywood’s standard stories about AI had revolved around guns, stabbings, and explosions."
The treacherous fem-bot that complicated AI ethics - The Boston Globe
10 years ago, the movie "Ex Machina" posed a new question: What if you thought of artificial intelligence as a woman?
BostonGlobe.com (www.bostonglobe.com)
