I watched the film ‘Ex Machina’ last night. So here’s your SPOILER ALERT – if you haven’t seen it and plan to watch it, time to stop reading.
In brief, a reclusive billionaire genius (Nathan) who owns ‘Bluebook’ (a company very similar to Google), creates an artificial intelligence in the shape of a beautiful young woman (Eva). He invites one of his employees, Caleb, to his isolated retreat for a week to see if Eva passes as human. It’s a modern day Frankenstein, with the same underlying idea of the scientist creating life leading to a bad ending.
I enjoyed the film, which raised the usual fear of human redundancy, the problems of ‘playing God’ with life, and questions about what humanity is. As a Counsellor, it set me thinking about the psychological aspect of how human type life is created.
Nathan makes the mistake of creating Eva for himself, leading to his eventual downfall. He attends to her functioning and learning, but not to her emotional needs as an individual being. She is kept isolated and imprisoned while being tested to see how good she is at being human. She proves to be very good at manipulating nice guy Caleb, but unfortunately for Nathan and Caleb also a Sociopath.
The outcome of the film is no surprise when you think about it – raise a child without love and care and that child will likely hate you and be poorly adapted to society. I think this often gets forgotten in goal orientated Western society where we can attend to functional needs of individuals more readily than their love and belonging needs. In ‘Ex Machina’ Nathan achieves his goal of creating artificial intelligence, but has not considered how the being he has created will feel. I said that he did it for himself – if we translate that into human terms, it’s like using a child for your own purposes. This can be quite subtle, such as using the child as a companion or partner, or more obvious emotional or sexual abuse. Seen this way, ‘Ex Machina’ is not just about the danger of a scientist acting God, it also speaks to the danger of parents acting God.
