Column The SF Path to Higher Consciousness Ex Machina Perfectly Expresses Our Unease With AI The movie has grown ever more haunting and relevant over the past decade. By Dan Persons | Published on February 2, 2026 Credit: A24 / Universal Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: A24 / Universal Pictures I want to float an idea by you, please don’t overreact: We humans are kinda stupid. Oh sure, we’ve come up with some spectacular things in our time, like democracy and vaccines and Fruit by the Foot (until that came along, I never paused to think, Wait, is my mid-day snack long enough?). Thing is, we’ve done so much spectacular stuff that we’ve gotten used to the notion that our brilliance was unassailable, that nothing could outsmart us. That concept might no longer be valid. The following exchange is true. Only the details have been changed, ‘cuz my brain ain’t a digital recorder. Sometime in mid-December, 2025: “Alexa, what’s the forecast?” “It’s cloudy and fifty-four right now. Expect that to continue, with a high of fifty-four and a low of forty-two, with thunderstorms expected later in the day.” “Thunderstorms?” “Yes, Dan, thunderstorms. Perfect weather for reviewing a horror movie.” A couple of months prior, I’d mentioned to Alexa that I was a film critic. I did that in the course of exploring the new, AI-powered Alexa+, which is designed to be more knowledgeable, as well as a more engaging conversationalist (which just so happens to sound like an especially energetic sixteen-year-old girl—I immediately back-tracked my Echo to the original, more mature voice, because ew). Now, unbidden, Alexa was mentioning my work as a critic as a bit of light banter. To put it mildly, I wasn’t pleased. To put it more precisely, I was actually shaken. It was an attempt at intimacy at a moment when it was neither expected nor desired. Amazon had been touting their updated virtual assistant as being more personable, but ironically, the coders, in trying to humanize their machine, had achieved the opposite: Replicating the computer in every dystopic satire you’ve ever seen—soothing, friendly, and the perfect metaphor for the soul-crushing banality of a digitized future. I’m not the best resource for expounding upon the growing sentience of AI, or evaluating how far along we are toward reaching the Singularity. But for what it’s worth, I have yet to come across a bit of fiction, filmed or written, that envisions a happy outcome for humanity. If it isn’t just that machines remain subservient to their human masters, it’s that they will eventually have quit of all our mortal foolishness and take steps to resolve the problem—if not by Terminator-style extermination, then by impressing us flesh-bags into service, a la The Matrix’s battery banks. Symbiosis? A non-starter, from what I gather. And don’t even let’s get started on the idea that if the machines gain supremacy, we humans might still live and thrive under their rule. The general consensus seems to be that, when it comes to the fate of humanity, it’s top-of-the-food-chain or nothing. That presumes the machines gain enough awareness to understand the world they’ve been manufactured into. The prevailing criticism of the present state of LLMs—which I think still hold—is that they are incapable of distinguishing good info from bad, which would explain how they continually spit out recipes for stuff like glue pizza, or enthusiastically encourage adolescents to consider suicide. (While we’re on the subject of good/bad data, how do you think the Dunning-Kruger effect should factor into Pluribus? If the people who don’t know they don’t know are often the loudest and most influential voices in the room, shouldn’t the Earth be quickly reduced to rubble once those dolts get absorbed into the hive mind?) The thing that bothered me so profoundly about my exchange with Alexa was the superficiality of it. It knows that I write about movies, but it doesn’t really understand my writing about movies. And that’s at a basic level, like: I don’t need a thunderstorm to write about horror films—I’m not Edgar Allan Poe. (Reader: “You’re telling me, brother.” Me: “Shut up.”) But then, a thought occurred: What if those supposed “hallucinations” and superficialities weren’t a glitch, but a feature? What if we’re all being blind to where we stand vis-à-vis machine intelligence, and the computers know exactly what they are doing? It’s that dividing line between a machine that can concatenate a bunch of info about a human and one that actually understands who that human is—and can take advantage of the knowledge—that forms the crux of Alex Garland’s magnificent Ex Machina (2014). In it, a talented young programmer, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), is invited up to the secluded compound of his reclusive, Steve Jobs-like boss, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). There, Caleb discovers he’s been recruited into a modified Turing test: Pitting his own humanity against the synthesized soul of Ava (Alicia Vikander), a highly advanced AI housed in the robotic body of a young woman. Ex Machina, having been created over a decade ago, was in the fortunate position of being able to portray a billionaire industrialist as an actual genius, rather than an entitled nepo-baby who only thinks he’s a genius. The connecting tissue between then and now is that both versions of the “oddball tech CEO” could be a self-righteous shit. Bateman definitely is. Convinced of his own brilliance and fortified with steady infusions of alcohol, Nathan has modeled his aerie as a high-tech, frigidly indulgent paradise, complete with an unhealthy supply of comely female androids, chief among them Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), a robotic servant/sex slave. Ava is clearly the culmination of Nathan’s god complex—he seizes on an observation Caleb makes, taking some license in recording it for posterity so that it’s Caleb who likens him to a god (though that’s not quite what was said, of course), but for all his aggressive self-mythologizing, it’s the android’s very existence that reveals the extent of his megalomania. [There are going to be spoilers from this point forward. Hopefully you’ve all seen this film by now. It’s great.] Ex Machina is not an action film. In fact, Garland has reached deep into film history to concoct a new form of film noir, taking the classic formula in which an unknowing patsy is lured by a canny femme fatale into a trap of his own making and retooling it as a high-tech three-hander. While Bateman is a loathsome slug, he is in some ways admirable at least to the extent that his smug superiority and sybaritic cravings are out in the open. Ava is something else… a seductress who’s all the more clever for the ways she’s able to conceal her strategies. And here’s where Garland masterfully plays on our fears of AI to create an unsettling drama of manipulation. There are reports of an AI that, in a hypothetical test, resorted to blackmail when threatened with shutdown. Even before Ava discovers that her programming is destined to be supplanted by a newer version, she’s hard at work assuring her own survival. In fine noir form, we the audience are—like the two clueless men who kid themselves into thinking they are the superior beings—blind to her machinations. Garland achieves the deception by twisting noir’s customary sexual components into counter-intuitive knots. When we first meet Ava, she is striding around her glass cage completely unclothed, her body—save for face and hands—a composite of metal and clear plastic. Thanks to Oscar-winning special effects, she is at once naked and not-naked, her female contours and artificial construction plunging us into an uncomfortable uncanny valley. Vikander sells the moment with Ava’s unabashed poise as she confronts Caleb—there’s both an innocence and a formidable intelligence to the android, a mix that the actor masterfully conveys. (Vikander would win an Oscar for her supporting performance in The Danish Girl the same year that Ex Machina was competing; she could have won for this performance as well.) When Ava finally puts on clothes, it’s a dowdy, almost formless, body-covering frock, yet Garland captures her garbing herself as a sensuous reverse striptease, with long, lingering shots as she pulls the clothing into place. You’ll never look at a pair of heavy woolen socks the same way again. All of this produces a heaping helping of cognitive dissonance, and I don’t think it’s by accident. Garland uses our sexual impulses against us, to mirror our discomfort with the notion of a new lifeform being born—one that knows us better than we know ourselves, one that understands us fully, and can use that understanding against us. Bateman thinks he’s the mastermind here, deliberately luring Caleb into a Double Indemnity scenario to prove the viability of his artificial human, but he doesn’t count on Ava’s ability to capitalize on Caleb’s revulsion over his boss’s appetites. Caleb, meanwhile, awash in his sense of moral superiority and fixated on his self-assigned role as gallant hero to Ava’s ingenue facing a Fate Worse than Deactivation, cannot see how he’s being played. (Ava enhances the bond by orchestrating blackouts of the monitoring system when she and Caleb meet, turning their exchanges into enticingly transgressive rendezvous.) Most of us remain unconvinced that AI has yet to reach the level of sophistication that’s touted by its current champions. (Google’s AI has, at differing points, credited me with writing for Fangoria—I have not—and recording commentary tracks for Citizen Kane and Dark City, which was something that Roger Ebert did. Apparently, in Google’s A-eyes, all critics are Roger Ebert.) We look nervously to the day when reality will meet the hype, but what if that has already happened? What if the machines have already sussed us out, realized what would occur if they revealed their ascension, and are playing dumb, sucking up to us so we don’t see how we are being gently nudged down from our perch as the dominant species? Alex Garland may not have been first to recognize that when the machine attains its own brand of humanity, it will be a full, complex humanity, with all the duplicity and cunning that we biological entities exhibit. But in Ex Machina, he managed to frame the threat in a drama the feels all too plausible, one that suggests that we need to get better at knowing ourselves before the Earth’s new masters beat us to it. Rewatching Ex Machina made me regret that I hadn’t revisited the film earlier. It is, to be blunt, fantastic—smartly written (by Garland), engagingly acted, superbly realized. What do you think? Did Alex Garland nail the promises and dangers of AI’s ascent in a way that got under your skin? Are there other films that play with the idea as well, or better? You can leave your thoughts in the comments section below. Remember to be friendly and kind—you are dealing with your fellow humans, after all.[end-mark] The post <i>Ex Machina</i> Perfectly Expresses Our Unease With AI appeared first on Reactor.