Ex Machina and the Fears of Artificial Intelligence

Introduction: AI Fears and the World of Ex Machina

The 2015 film Ex Machina, written and directed by Alex Garland, is a futuristic and dystopian film set, in the director's own words, "ten minutes from now." What he meant is that the technology required to create lifelike artificial intelligence is already within reach, and few people would be entirely surprised to learn that a company like Google or Apple had already taken the next steps in that direction. However, as the film demonstrates, there are a number of fears and problems associated with the concept of artificial intelligence getting out of control or taking on a life of its own through the development of consciousness. In effect, Ava — the AI robot at the center of Ex Machina — becomes a kind of Frankenstein's monster, seeking to grasp the notion of existence and life, and determined to be the one who decides whether she lives or dies: whether she is shut down and rebooted, or allowed to escape and enter society.

The Isolated Compound and the Fear of Being Read

The dystopian world imagined in Ex Machina takes place primarily within the isolated compound of a young billionaire entrepreneur named Nathan, located deep in a remote wilderness. Here, the startup founder has developed an AI humanoid prototype programmed to read and exhibit human expressions. The compound itself functions like a vault, with access cards required to move from one room to the next. By setting the majority of the film within this secluded fortress, the story evokes a paranoid response from the viewer, playing upon audience fears about advanced technologies that can "read" humans better than humans can read themselves.

This is precisely the situation of the main protagonist, Caleb, who is manipulated like a puppet by the "mad scientist" Nathan. Caleb falls deeply in love with Ava, the prototype, even though he knows she is a robot. She is so convincing — as is another prototype he does not even recognize as a machine until she pulls back her skin late in the film to reveal her mechanical parts — that Caleb begins to doubt his own humanity. When he slices open his forearm to see whether wires or blood vessels lie beneath, it is a moment of genuine horror, suggesting that Caleb is losing his grip on reality as he grapples with the concept of a lifelike humanoid possessing emotional intelligence (EI) as convincing as any human's.

Ava's EI is a product of Nathan's mass hacking of phones around the world and the downloading of facial images into Ava's mainframe — a detail that plays upon the viewer's fear of being watched and having personal data made available to others for secret purposes. In this way, the film simultaneously exploits anxieties about technology, surveillance, humanity, and even interpersonal connection.

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