Endless Janes: Ex Machina

Have we come a long way, baby? I don’t know. I’m not going to pretend to have a line on the first AI done in film or novel or story—and, after Ex Machina, no way am I going to profile myself Feed-style by entering this into a search engine—but, working from my limited set, I can see us starting in the general area of Hal 9000, a male AI, coming up from ‘him’ to the also-male computer in War Games, and, after that, AI goes largely female. Yes, no? I mean, Jane from the Ender books is the obvious female AI (or, that’s the voice she uses for Ender), but three decades later we’re still at Samantha in Her, and between them there’s everything from Cherry 2000 to whatever AI that is that Clive Cussler’s Juan Cabrillo salvages (in . . . was it The Jungle?). Or, just look at the first three Terminators, how they process from a male terminator to a ‘scary’ female one. That seems to track, in miniature, how our stories have dealt with AI and gender. But why? What does it say about us that this is the story we seem to prefer? Is it the ‘incorporate’ woman who’s somehow actually . . .  non-threatening? compelling? (which seems a poor way of incorporating a woman into the storyline. related: if fantasy-tech is the only way to incorporate women into a story, that might be an alarm right there, then could be something’s wrong right there) Or is that males aren’t to be trusted with all this  . . . → → →