Ex-Machina Film Analysis

The film Ex-Machina follows the winner of a company lottery, Caleb, who travels to his boss’s, Nathan’s, remote home as a prize. While there, Caleb discovers that he is supposed to test Nathan’s latest android named Ava. Eventually, Caleb falls in love with Ava and attempts to help her escape after she begs him for assistance. However, Ava ultimately kills Nathan and leaves Caleb locked inside the mansion while she boards a helicopter to the outside world. While the film seems to address the connection between artificial intelligence and human consciousness, there are several more subtle messages. One of these is the cultural determinist bias of the film which gives us a fuller understanding of what Ex-Machina accomplishes. It is clear that Ex-Machina as a whole supports a cultural …show more content…
This point of view is called cultural determinism. Whereas technological determinists believe that technology causes societal changes, cultural determinists believe that society causes technological innovation and change. Essentially, technology is the result of human development. For example, a cultural determinist would say that Facebook does not cause people to lose the ability to communicate face to face, rather those who do not want to communicate face to face use Facebook as a means to avoid it. Within the theory of cultural determinism, two different effects of technology are defined. The first are “foreseen effects [which] are called intended effects” and they are simply what a technology was made to do (Slack and Wise 47). The second are “revenge effects, which might be desirable or undesirable, [and] are unforeseen consequences that are directly linked to the intended effects” (Slack and Wise 47). Although revenge effects are not always negative, we can see in the film Ex-Machina they, unfortunately,