Human
This one is for Josh Malle: Happy belated birthday!
On Monday, a few minutes into my session, my therapist noted, “You’re being really hard on yourself. I think the theme for this week needs to be ‘I’m human.’” The context for my self-reproach had to do more with my professional identity, and it echoes through my sense of powerlessness in the face of our political situation, but yesterday, I took the time to unwind and think about the nature of being human along a different angle by finally taking the time to watch Alex Garland’s 2014 movie Ex Machina, which I’ve been meaning to watch for years, but never got around to. Watching a movie let me take a break from striving to get everything done and it raised all sorts of questions about what it means to be human.
One thing that is dreary about living in this era is that on a regular basis one wakes up, finally rested and ready to face the day, and the news is about bombing a country. A short while ago it was Venezuela, today it’s Iran. The “bomb first, ask questions later” approach is particularly unsettling in that wars can escalate, and a new study shows that when A.I. simulates wars, it escalates to nuclear exchange 95% of the time. This steady diet of foreign hostility is, of course, part of the “flood the zone” approach to wearing down the population with so much nonsense that it becomes impossible to keep up with the news and sort out the signal from the noise. But the article on A.I. having virtually no inhibitions when it comes to nuclear warfare connects the madmen’s foreign policy to the more general existential questions Ex Machina asks about A.I.
A modern mashup of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, Frankenstein, and The Stepford Wives, Ex Machina delves deep into the sexual politics of artificial intelligence. Had I watched it in 2014, when it came out, it would have felt like science fiction. Watching it a mere 12 years later, it felt more like a documentary. Although it’s not a new release, I’ll try to talk about it without spoilers. I will say that the story felt like Duke Bluebeard’s Castle pretty early and there was one scene in particular where I was all, “YEP! That’s the template!” And later it struck me that Oscar Isaac’s character sported a magnificent beard that anchored the movie to the older story.
One of the first things that struck me about Ex Machina is that, like the more recent movie Mountainhead, another exploration of the nature of the techbro, the setting for technological mania is a house in a very remote setting, deep in natural wilderness. It’s a feature of masculinist technology to go to the extremes of a technological hatred of nature and sense of nature that is pure wildness. The technologists both hate nature enough that they want to replace it but also seek to escape the urban repercussions of the technology they keep wanting to expand. The visuals of Ex Machina keep shuttling between an isolated indoors where technology reins supreme and the pristine natural beauty of where that indoors is built. Perhaps there is no better real-life example of this pull between a life fundamentally dedicated to destroying the natural world and a retreat to the most remote place to connect with nature’s beauties than former Vice President Dick Cheney.
In this sense, the movie brought out a kind of sadness that none of the lessons of the environmental movement, none of the insights from the women’s movement, seem to have much traction at the moment. As I watched the movie, I was aware that I was sweating because it was an unseasonably hot day. The repercussions of technology in climate collapse were all too palpable. Even in Southern California, I should not be sweating from the heat in February.
Before I go down a depressive doom spiral, I guess I should pause to remember that social movements still work and activists in Colorado managed to stand up to Palantir, the most grotesque embodiment of the masculinist tech ideology Ex Machina critiques to date. As the historian of labor and technology Brian Merchant notes, the left is winning the A.I. debate on several fronts. If the techbros want us to surrender to the inevitable telos of an imagined technology, plenty of people are just not having it.
A.I. in general feels like an assault on humanity, but Ex Machina was a good reminder that the real inhumanity can be very human. Just like my therapist asked me to be kind with my own limitations, Ex Machina’s using technology as a mirror to expose human egoism and cruelty is a moment to reflect on our communal limitations. We all have the capacity for kindness and cruelty, we all create and destroy, we all are figuring it out. I don’t particularly like where technology has already taken us, but we can only start from where we are, and I suppose I will have to continue thinking about the nature of technology for the rest of my life, although it is one of the least interesting things in the world to me. Ex Machina was a wonderfully executed movie that made that task fun.