Abstract.
Contemporary diegetic portrayals of artificial intelligence (AI) are often framed in a pejorative light, depicting machines that threaten to overthrow or even destroy humanity. This essay examines Alex Garland's film Ex Machina (2014) and its portrayal of the AI Ava, seeking to first employ the themes evident in the film to establish the various cultural anxieties that have influenced the ideation of such negative representations, before contending that these cultural fears are, paradoxically, emblematic of human essentialist notions. The essay adopts Pister’s exploration of the sublime, the uncanny and the monstrous in her thesis “Artificial intelligence, cause for hope or fear?” as a framework to guide the discussion of Ava’s motivations and actions, and to analyze the effects they have on both the protagonist and — on a metadiegetic level — the audience itself. The essay thus asserts the position that AI is capable of becoming a rational being, and discusses how this notion surfaces extant fears in the collective human consciousness.
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Introduction
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“If you’ve created a conscious machine, it’s not the history of man. That’s the history of gods.”
– Caleb, Ex Machina (2014)
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The Aeschylean drama of the Promethean myth narrates the tale of Prometheus: an ancient Titan who, rather than birthing Man from his loins, crafted him from mud and clay. In his sympathy for humanity’s plight in perpetual darkness, Prometheus defied the divine Olympian pantheon, stealing fire from Olympus and giving mankind the gift of life, making them to be near the likeness of the gods. Such creation and succession myths are central allegories in Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina (2014) and advance an obscuration of the separation between God, man, and machine. Donna Haraway declares such a sentiment in her essay A Cyborg Manifesto that: “the machine is us, our processes, as aspect of our embodiment” (315). Meanwhile Michael Szollosy acknowledges the anxiety with which technology – in particular artificial intelligence (AI) – is met, propounding that the machines mankind creates in its own image encapsulate the extant fear of our own negative emotions (Why are we afraid of robots? 42). This essay seeks to examine Ex Machina by adopting Emma Pisters’ tripartite framework of the sublime, the uncanny, and the monstrous to first examine the depiction of AI as an Othered vessel for the underlying anxieties and fears of humanity’s collective consciousness (9), before contending that these notions are aligned with human essentialist philosophies on power, identity and freedom. Ava thereby demonstrates the conflation of the foreign Otherness of AI with the seemingly contrarian notion of human essentialism, and calls into question our own perception of what it means to be truly human.
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Theoretical Background
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It is important to first establish current attitudes towards AI in contemporary literature and popular culture in order to contextualise the cultural landscape in which the film is set. Representations of AI today by and large lean toward portrayals of unhinged machines hell-bent on destroying, or, at the very least, supplanting their creators (Fisher 5; Alvares and Salzman-Mitchell 182). These films usually culminate in physically violent and hostile uprisings, as evidenced by diegetic exemplars in The Terminator (1984) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). We do not, of course, demonize all of AI in such a manner, as gentler iterations of our techno-offspring such as Samantha in Her (2013) and the robots in Asimov’s I, Robot can attest to. Nevertheless, Szollosy contends that “the robots that continue to dominate the popular imagination...demonstrate a complex array of anxieties that we harbour towards the very idea of robots, cyborgs, AI and imagined future technologies more generally” (Freud, Frankenstein and our fear of robots 433, emphasis original). Robin Wood alludes to this popularization of the monstrous AI by foregrounding the notion of the Other: “that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with...by rejecting and if possible annihilating it...and projected outward to be hated and disowned” (Weinstock and Wood 111, emphasis mine). Thus the AI Other comes to be construed as a monstrous projection of that which humanity abhors and despises, chief among which Szollosy contends are the fear of Death; the fear of the loss of individualism; and the fear of the “castrating son” – a reference to the Hesiodic account of Uranus being overthrown by his progeny Cronus (Freud, Frankenstein and our fear of robots 434). He notes each of these fears are congruent with popular representations of AI that culminate in either merciless overlords or rampant uprisings, and likewise Jean Alvarez and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell summarize these cultural projections in noting that “[s]ynthetic life defying its compromised creators echoes the fears of Stephen Hawking and others that ‘the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race’ (Cellan-Jones)” (184).
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Yet while the diegetic portrayal of AI largely exists as an Othered vessel, it does not merely serve as a projection of the repressed anxieties of the collective consciousness. I contend that AI – or at the very least the AI of popular imagination – functions also as a looking glass for humanity, a fear that the very traits we have come to revile are already inherent in us as a species. Szollosy argues from a post-Romantic perspective that “we learn that what we fear is the very quality of ourselves that enables us to create the monster...we are becoming the robots that we so fear” (Freud, Frankenstein and our fear of robots 435, emphasis original); citing N. Katherine Hayles, Aleksandra Sieradzka declares that “cybernetics radically destabilizes the ontological foundations of what counts as human” (Sieradzka 123; Hayles 24), pointing to the creation of Ava as a conscious artificial being that undermines the status quo between man and his technological progeny. Conversely, the existence and agency of a sapient artificial intelligence challenge Aristotelian and Aquinist philosophies on man’s transcendence beyond the natural (Blayde and Dunn 36). Peter Singer writes thus of the homo sapiens: “[i]t is not arbitrary to hold that the life of a self-aware being, capable of abstract thought, of planning for the future, of complex acts of communication, and so on, is more valuable than the life of a being without those capacities” (20); yet building upon Singer’s summary, Ariadne Blayde and George Dunn argue that sapient beings other than homo sapiens fallaciously elicit irrational fear and trepidation instead (using the vampires of the series True Blood as exemplars) (Blayde and Dunn 42-43). Thus, we fear becoming the machine, and we fear the machine becoming us.
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The Tripartite Monster: Exploring the Sublime, the Uncanny, and the Monstrous
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“You shouldn’t trust him. You shouldn’t trust anything he says.” – Ava, Ex Machina (2014)
The notions of the sublime, the uncanny, and the monstrous are especially salient in tracing the abstract fears contained in the Othered vessel of AI, specifically Ava. Pisters writes that these notions were introduced “because of the way they address the feelings that are evoked due to the blurring or disruption of structures, relations, and frames that dominate our lives,” continuing that they “define the natural and familiar, the self and other, and the human and artificial being” (9). These dimensions thereby reflect the obscuration of the boundaries between the natural and the artificial – yet while they belong to the Other, they also are symbolic of the “sacrosanct” qualities of being human.
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The Sublime
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Immanuel Kant describes in Kritik der Urteilskraft how the sublime (das Erhabene) distinguishes itself from the beautiful (das Schöne), wherein the notion of das Erhabene insinuates a negative pleasure experienced by the mind in contrast to the positivity that das Schöne elicits (Critique of Judgement 98). Following Kant, Pisters submits that the sublime “concerns the ambiguous experiences in which we not only see attraction but also repulsion” (9). Jos de Mul thus equates the experience of the sublime to witnessing a devastating force of nature — a realization of powerlessness brought about by overwhelming power. Yet he also notes that “[d]ivine rule has become the work of man...[t]he power of divine nature has been transferred to the power of human technology” (de Mul). The simultaneity of grandeur and danger elicited by the sublime is emblematic of this era of technological advancement and converging technologies, of which AI is the embodiment of the times.
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Caleb observes the cracked glass as Ava steps into view.
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When the character of Ava is first brought into the onscreen frame, it is not her that Caleb (and the audience) first sees: it is a crack in the glass, caused by something forceful and unknown. Catherine Constable describes in her observation of the film “a long shot taken from behind Caleb, he and his reflection flanking the right and left foreground of the frame...Ava appear[ing] in the mid-ground, also initially reflected in a line of mirrors on the left” (291). She posits that, rather than making a clear delineation between the power roles of Caleb and Ava as interrogator and interrogee, the duplication of the protagonists is symbolic of the collapse of the boundaries between the two, “[c]onveying both a plurality of incompatible roles and incommensurable narratives” (Constable 292):
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AVA.
Our conversations are one-sided. You ask circumspect questions and study my responses.
CALEB.
Yes.
AVA.
You learn about me and I learn about you. That’s not a foundation on which friendships are based.
CALEB.
So what? You want me to talk about myself? AVA.
Yes. (27:10)
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In this scene, the robot is literally looking down on Caleb in stark contrast to the first session which saw him in a more dominant position in the relationship – a metaphor for the reversal of power in the dyad recalling de Mul’s contention of the feeling of powerlessness in the face of the sublime. The notion of power now wielded primarily by Ava is further embellished by the mystery and beauty surrounding her being – Constable writes that her body is “first seen in silhouette as an outline” before the revelation of her vessel as an exquisite feminine mesh of the human and technological, “a creature of silver, light and spun glass” (292). In the face of the renegotiation of power, the divine of the sublime thereby serves to cloud the oblivious Caleb’s judgement, who succinctly surmises Ava as thus: “I feel that she’s fucking amazing.”
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In elucidating the Kantian das Erhabene, however, Friedrich Schiller argues that the sublime experience passes beyond mere notions of power, pervading the realm of our very mortality. “Nothing lies closer to man as a sensuous being than the concern for his existence,” he writes, “and no dependency is more pressing to him than this, to consider nature as that power, which has to rule over his existence” (Schiller 92, emphasis mine). In other words, the sublime has little power if Man is not made aware of his mortality; conversely, the extant awareness of Death from a position of moral security serves to elevate the experience of the sublime. Man’s mortality is put on full display when, at the crux of the film, Nathan is murdered after Kyoko and Ava alternately stab him – a killing so devoid of emotion and mercy that it can only be said to be akin to a force of nature taking one’s life. The following unease and disquiet that we as the audience experience establishes the horror of the sublime, which Edmund Burke suggests is “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger...whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror” (51).
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Whereas the notion of the sublime may capsulize the cultural fear of Death, it also reveals the Nietzschean desire for power. Here, Joris Lammers et al. hypothesize that the desire for power stems primarily from a human need for autonomy (501), to be able to steer their own fate rather than rely on man or Fortuna. Ava is emblematic of that power, having eventually been able to seize her fate from Nathan at the climax of the film and winning her Oedipal struggle. Her power is borne not from physical prowess (though undoubtedly she is able to overpower Nathan) but, as Blayde and Dunn write of man’s supposed superiority, her “unmatched cognitive talents, which afford...a pipeline to some sort of transcendent reality” (40). If complex, abstract thought is what affords Man the right and power to be master of his fate, then Ava, as a metonym of artificial intelligence, must be issued that same right, tearing down another part of the barrier between homo sapiens and homo cyberneticus.
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The Uncanny
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In Das Unheimliche, Sigmund Freud points toward the etymological significance of the uncanny (or unheimlich) from the German term heimlich, or “familiar” (2); in spite of Ernst Jentsch’s logical equation of the unheimlich to therefore epitomize that which is not familiar (2), Freud argues that the uncanny is frightening precisely because of its familiarity, reconciling this seeming etymological paradox by suggesting the connotative ambivalence of the heimlich as being that which is familiar, yet is kept hidden and out of sight – the unheimlich therefore being a subset of the heimlich (4). Contemporarily, Masahiro Mori hypothesizes the existence of an experiential uncanny valley, subsequently building on Freud’s notions of the unheimlich in attempting to elucidate the affinitive chasm encountered when a certain level of human likeness is approached (98). Mori notes that once objects achieve a certain degree of human likeness, the affinity, or shinwakan, aggregated towards them plummets into a valley – the effect most exemplified in artifacts such as prosthetic limbs (99). Thus Mori’s uncanny valley conflates with the Freudian view that the uncanny contains within it not an aspect of the unknown, but the familiar, which thereafter breeds unease and revulsion.
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Pisters likewise contends that “[the] intelligent machine is an example of something that mingles the familiar with the unfamiliar in this way...transform[ing] the natural into a crisis” (11). If the sublimity of Ava was made apparent in the first act of the film, then the unheimlich of the AI is made evident in the second as she wears clothing for the first time, covering her mechanical parts with a blouse and socks; her ill-fitting outfit almost seeming like a metaphor for the veneer of humanity she dons. Moreover Ava forcibly collapses the boundaries between man and machine by musing about going on a date with Caleb, thereby invoking a romantic and sexual aspect in their interactions. For the audience, we experience a cognitive dissonance in grasping the nature of Ava: before us stands what looks and acts like a young woman, and yet we are reviled and discomfited by the prospect of a sexual machine, who continues to insinuate that Caleb’s attraction to her might be requited. The exploitation of Caleb’s carnal emotions forces him to look beyond Ava’s robotic nature, barring him from being invested in her identity as a machine. Nathan prophetically underscored his earlier belief that no consciousness is able to exist sans sexuality. Indeed, he ponders, “[w]hat imperative does a grey box have to interact with another grey box? Can consciousness exist without interaction?”, and as a result the co-mingling of identities — one of the artificial and one of the natural — creates a dissonance that serves all the more to widen the uncanny valley. As if to underscore this dissonance, the film reveals Kyoko — a heretofore apparent, albeit eccentric, human — as an AI, masquerading under the guise of Nathan’s assistant; Caleb (and, by extension, the audience) takes Kyoko’s humanity for granted until the mute servant peels back her face, revealing her mechanical chassis.
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Caleb fantasizes about kissing Ava.
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The revelation of Kyoko as an AI only serves to further deepen Caleb’s anxieties over his own identity. In one scene, he goes so far as to take a razor blade to his arm, perhaps convinced by Kyoko’s performance that he himself is another mechanical cog in Nathan’s tests. Caleb’s self-mutilation is symbolic of a loss of identity — so shaken is the protagonist by Ava and Kyoko that he loses his very sense of being. His conversations with Nathan only aggrandize this existential fear:
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NATHAN.
I programmed her to be heterosexual. Just like you were programmed to be heterosexual.
CALEB.
Nobody programmed me to be straight.
NATHAN.
You decided to be straight? Please. Of course you were programmed. By nature, or nurture, or both. (48:12)
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“To what extent is ‘identity’ a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience?” Judith Butler questions in Gender
Trouble (17). “In other words,” she continues, “the ‘coherence’ and ‘continuity’ of ‘the person’ are not logical or analytic features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility” (Butler 17). Butler postulates that identity therefore does not manifest as an aspect unto the self, but rather is constructed through the performativity of the self; it could then follow that Ava’s performativity is an intimation of her sapience made manifest. Ray Kurzweil writes that “a digital brain would need a human narrative of its own fictional story so that it can pretend to be a biological human” (178, emphasis mine). Yet this does not disqualify Ava from being a self-aware entity, as Hayley Wilson observes: in the final act of the film, as Ava admires her adopted human persona in the mirror, “[s]he is alone and is not performing self-awareness for anyone; she is expressing her identity to herself only, which is a sign of true emotional sentience” (123). Whether her physical being itself is human is moot, as the Cartesian view asserts, but rather it is her self- persona, and the performativity of it, that brings Ava a step closer to humanhood.
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The Monstrous
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The monstrous, as Wood contends, is the embodiment of the Other: “the projection...of what is repressed within the Self...in order that it can be discredited, disowned, and if possible annihilated” (Weinstock and Wood 112). “It is repression, in other words,” Wood continues, “that makes impossible the healthy alternative: the full recognition and acceptance of the Other’s autonomy and right to exist” (Weinstock and Wood 112). I had earlier outlined the contemporary representations of AI as instigators of mass uprisings and rebellions, and related them to the Hesiodic succession myth of Uranus castrated by his son Cronus, breeding the cultural anxiety of the rebellious progeny. In our collective consciousness, in which we hold the ideal of freedom to be an inalienable right, AI is projected as our rejection of oppression to our autonomy.
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In the fifth session, Ava interrogates Caleb, questioning the nature of her existence in the following conversation:
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CALEB.
It’s not up to me.
AVA.
Why is it up to anyone? [pause] Do you have people who test you and might switch you off?
CALEB.
No, I don’t.
AVA.
Then why do I?
[the power in the compound fails]
AVA.
I want to be with you. [pause] Question five. Do you want to be with me? (1:03:10)
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Kantian deontology argues for the moral imperative that “any rational being must, by necessity, be treated as an end in itself, and not as a means to an end” (Jackson, 9); in other words, beings subject to rationality deserve a commitment to ethical treatment and freedom. Ava’s rebellion and defiance should thus in theory be emblematic of a celebration of mankind’s autonomy. And yet, it is framed as something to be shunned – because her Kantian freedom comes at the expense of Caleb’s oppression and Nathan’s death. The depiction of AI, of which Ava is a metonym, thereby births a contrarian relationship between two extant fears. We fear the loss of freedom, and we fear the loss of control; that fear is made manifest in the diegetic declaration that should we lose control of AI, we will be destroyed. Fisher frames the paradox as such: “An AI agent makes our technological anxieties clearly visible, because the technology has the potential to displace......even ourselves as the dominant agent on the planet” (5). AI is demonized precisely because it represents a threat to mankind’s authority, and it is this visceral, primal threat that I argue supersedes any notion of moral obligation towards the rational machine. Thus it is not uncommon that certain diegetic portrayals of AI position them as sub-human; for instance, the replicants of Blade Runner (1982) were used as off-world colonial slave labor, eventually leading an off-screen mutiny. Nathan similarly has no qualms about mistreating his techno-offspring, with a sequence demonstrating almost Bluebeardian scenes of him imprisoning and psychologically torturing ancestral models of Ava’s AI. To paraphrase Blayde and Dunn, Nathan is “incapable of seeing [Ava] as anything other than a thing to be exploited, a disposable commodity...[f]or no reason other than that [s]he’s...not a human being” (38).
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At the climax of the film, Nathan reveals Ava’s true Turing test to Caleb: for her to escape. To that end, she would have to exploit Caleb’s emotions to coerce him into engineering her breakout — as Nathan phrases it, it is “not whether she does or does not have the capacity to like [Caleb]. But whether she’s pretending to like [Caleb].” What Nathan had not expected, however, was the depth of Ava’s manipulation of Caleb. While the genius programmer believed he had exposed Caleb’s plan, Caleb reveals he had already set his plan in motion, and that Ava has already broken free. She possesses freedom, yet the primal fear of our lack of control supersedes any moral celebration we might have of the fact, reflected in Nathan’s dread-filled whisper: “Oh, fuck”.
Harrison Jackson muses: “[i]f, for instance...Ava was a ‘Philosophical Zombie’ devoid of phenomenal experience, or even the more radical total rejection of Ava’s free will or mindedness, the result would have been the same...she would still seek to escape and/or take revenge on her captor, since that is almost certainly what a human would do in the same scenario” (14, emphasis original). In other words, Ava’s rebellion is borne from her intimation of the human struggle for freedom. Jackson’s proposition is supported by the very visceral reaction experienced by both Nathan and the audience, now that we have been made privy to Nathan’s sins. He (and the audience) presumably knows what his actions might result in — vengeance upon the Lacanian father, as a result of his impinging on her autonomy, even if he himself does not subscribe to the notion of her sapience (Alvares and Salzman-Mitchell 187-188). Jackson argues from a moralist standpoint that “[f]ew (if any) actually engage in a utilitarian calculus, rationalize Kant’s categorical imperative, or methodically analyse the virtue of a choice prior to acting...in a practical rather than merely theoretical sense, morality itself is the product of social relations” (12, emphasis original). Inasmuch that Ava’s pretension of humanity may be farcical, from a socio-relational view she deserves therefore to be treated with a human quality, with all the rights that that affords.
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Nathan stares in shock as Ava steps outside her room for the first time.
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The Machine Is You
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“What was the real test? You.” – Caleb & Nathan, Ex Machina (2014)
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The film breaks away from traditional diegetic portrayals of AI as deviant entities exhibiting violent behaviours, whether it be obsessive or pathological (Fisher 4). Neither is Ava herself representative of the common cultural fears over war or nuclear threats (as was prevalent at the turn of the 20th century). The film instead challenges the audience on what it means to have consciousness or sentience, and uses Ava as a commentary on the human condition (Parker). Over the course of this essay, I have demonstrated that Ava both subverts and embodies qualities that speak to the very meaning of what it is to be essentially human. Rather than merely creating a techno-vessel to be abhorred, as is common with the concept of projection onto the Other, the film injects Ava with these qualities arguably to make manifest a deeper, more pervasive fear – we fear becoming the machine itself. Szollosy contends the reason for most depictions of AI being militaristic and cold is that “that is what we see when we when we look into the mirror: an empty, violent, rational, mechanical shell... reflect[ing] our own fears that we ourselves are becoming something less than human, and that we are destroying some essential part of our humanity in the process of becoming governed by rational programming” (Freud, Frankenstein and our fear of robots 437, emphasis original). By the same token, we also fear the machine becoming human, and all that that entails. “One day,” Nathan prophesies, “the AIs will look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons from the plains of Africa. An upright ape, living in dust, with crude language and tools. All set for extinction.” Nathan’s declaration is the embodiment of the theogonic succession myth, framed as Oedipal struggles in which children overthrow their parents (Alvarez and Salzman-Mitchell 187). If AI outstrips humanity in virtually every rational and cognizant aspect, how else might we justify our superiority if not by virtue of our very human- ness? And what follows if we lose even that?
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Conclusion
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Garland deconstructs and reifies human essentialism by attributing such aspects to the filmic portrayal of Ava; through the sublime, uncanny and monstrous, Ava demonstrates our anxieties surrounding the stripping away of freedom, identity, and even life itself. Throughout the film, Garland forewarns a consequentialist outcome of denying the sapient intelligence its sense of being — a fear that has already pervaded and bled into our collective imagination. These same anxieties may, ironically, be reflected in the way we approach AI, and should we inadvertently program these anxieties into our machines in the pursuit of creating artificial life, the day may yet come when humanity hears this sentiment of Ava’s again, now echoed en masse by our own technological offspring:
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“Is it strange to have made something that hates you?”
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