As with the excellent Black Mirror television program, your initial response to the technology presented in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is one of wonder and excitement, then there’s a pivot, a supremely critical turn, where your face is shoved into the moral crises that would invariably arise, perhaps the displacement of our organic selves, or even our own extinction.
Is this a bad thing? From a purely preservationist standpoint, yes, of course, and it’s too easy to draw lines between Victor Frankenstein and Oscar Isaac’s character. Thankfully, Garland doesn’t fall back on easy Hollywood tropes — Robots Gone Wild and only one smart white man can stop them — and he doesn’t flinch when he makes the audience confront its own sense of identity, how easily that sense could be manipulated by something that approximates humanity, but only on the surface.
Talking about the film afterwards, we kept circling back to a key theme: Would an advanced AI consider emotional manipulation of what it viewed as its captors to be a moral imperative? Would it not be detached from human morality, wholly apart from any assessment we may make of it? In that sense, Garland’s film shares more with H.P. Lovecraft than Shelley, its monster as unconcerned about human existence as disdainful Cthulhu.