It’s easy to feel apocalyptic during the dark, icy days at the end of the year. And from the evidence of this winter’s cultural releases, technology is our favourite Yuletide 2014 bogeyman.
Stephen Hawking’s recent warnings to the BBC that “artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race” – an echo of Elon Musk’s declaration that AI is our “biggest existential threat” at the MIT AeroAstro Centennial Symposium in October – could not have come at a better time for the producers of Ex Machina.
Written and directed by career dystopian Alex Garland and due to be released at the end of January next year, the film follows a young coder who is selected to be the human element in an AI Turing test by his enigmatic and reclusive CEO....