The Succession Myth and the Rebellious AI Creation: Classical Narratives in the 2015 Film Ex Machina

摘要

The Succession Myth and the Rebellious AI Creation:Classical Narratives in the 2015 Film Ex Machina Jean Alvares and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell Alex Garland's 2015 film Ex Machina tells of Caleb, a coder for "Bluebook,"1 who wins a rigged contest to work with his genius boss Nathan in a remote location. There he will supposedly perform a more advanced version of the Turing test, in the course of which Caleb will come to believe that Ava, a robot, has humanlike intelligence. In fact, Nathan's test is closer to the Yudkowsky AI Box Experiment, which determines whether an AI can understand the human psyche enough to manipulate a human into freeing it from its box.2 Thus for Nathan, the real proof that he has created humanlike AI will be whether Ava can manipulate Caleb so he falls in love with her and helps her escape through her employment of an empathetic understanding of human emotions and desires—although he knows she is a robot.3 Ava aces the test. Helped by a long-abused gynoid (aka fembot) named Kyoko, she kills Nathan, locks up Caleb (probably to starve to death), and enters the world she has longed to see in order to become, perhaps, the "mother" of a new AI race: note how Ava's name evokes Eve.4 This film provoked intense discussions among scholars that [End Page 181] focused on issues concerning cyborgs, AI, human obsolescence, gender, and race. In this article, we focus on how archetypal creation and succession myths—the myths of Pandora and Pygmalion in particular as developed in Ex Machina—provide "tools to think with" regarding the relationship of automata to their human creators, to gendered individuals, and to our apocalyptic worries about humanity's potential demise. Greco-Roman mythology features several succession myths in which some action leads to a new configuration of power. The myth usually deals with a generational struggle, epitomized in the early conflicts of Uranos vs. Cronos and Cronos vs. Zeus. But this same redistribution of power can be observed in other myths. For example, Hesiod's account of the Gold through Iron Races of Humanity (Hes. W & D 109–210, Ovid Met. 1.89–150) is a kind of succession myth, as is the story of Demeter and Persephone. As we will show, Ovid's Pygmalion story in toto also provides a succession myth with its various generational confrontations. Taken together, these myths incorporate different (even non-androcentric) perspectives on the cosmos's evolution. Finally, we argue that reading a myth in tandem with recent parallels such as Ex Machina helps us realize its full implications.5 In classical mythology, the "womanufacture" of Athena and (to a lesser extent) Pandora is critical for Zeus's consolidation of power.6 There is a vast literary, artistic, and material tradition (whose twisted overtones are heard in Ex Machina) to womanufacture (see Wosk 2015), but we are particularly interested in the similarities between the womanufactures of Zeus (mainly Athena), Pygmalion, some later Pygmalions, and Nathan. For example, as Zeus swallows Metis to produce an "unnatural" Athena (Hes. Theog. 886–900; though, unlike Ava, Athena was initially engendered by Metis), whose gender seems more assigned than innate, so Nathan has, in a way, swallowed the internet (the collective Metis of the twenty-first century) and produced a mind-daughter whose gender he has determined.7 While Hesiod's poems provide the mythic structures for both later classical receptions and our movie, there are other myths where, unlike the [End Page 182] classic father and son conflict (Uranos vs. Cronos, etc.), fathers clash with their created daughters, actual (Zeus and Athena) or metaphoric (Pygmalion and his ivory maiden). In all succession myths, however, individuals usurp the rights of the ruling gods; Nathan thinks of himself in terms of Prometheus, who created humankind, stole fire, and later tricked Zeus on behalf of humans at Mecone (Theog. 535–616).8 Because of Pandora, this turned out badly for humans,