Alex Garland’s Ex Machina : the gender of artificial intelligence and the triumph of enlightenment

摘要

Science fiction has increasingly taken on the burden of our times in exploring the ways in which we seek to adjust to a global culture that prizes quantification and efficiency over qualitative values and the sheer pleasure of duration, favors enlightenment to the exclusion of romanticism. Where science fiction films had at one time alternated between reason and fear, science and horror—between Things to Come (1936) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), on the one hand, and Metropolis (1927) and Forbidden Planet (1956), on the other—today the dystopian film, in which humanity often loses its very identity, has seemingly prevailed. Reminiscent of the United States in 1950s and its science fiction films with their “imagination of disaster,”[2] contemporary science fiction films depict a scientific revolution enhanced by information technology. They envision a seismic shift in which we encounter not merely an “invasion of the body snatchers” but a world in which human beings are wholly defined by their technology. No more than the logical sum of their neurological parts, they have increasingly become indistinguishable from the artificial intelligence that they have created.