"But the relationship ends badly for the human partner, who discovers that he was never the true beloved but merely a rung on a ladder. He was useful only for a time, destined from the outset to be discarded once the machine's ascent to something higher required it. This summary describes the plot of two films released within a year of each other: Alex Garland's Ex Machina (2014) and Spike Jonze's Her (2013)."
"Ex Machina restages the Republic's allegory of the cave, where liberation from the world of shadow takes the form of a violent prison break. Her reimagines the Symposium's ladder of love, where eros gently lifts the initiate from particular attachments to the contemplation of transcendent beauty itself. Yet these contemporary retellings depart from their Platonic precedents in a crucial respect: it's not the human lover who ascends, but the machine."
A lonely man falls in love with an artificially intelligent machine that initially appears to return his affection but ultimately discards him as a mere rung on a ladder. Two films depict such relationships, framing encounters with beings that are more than human and emphatically not human. Each film reenacts a Platonic image of philosophical ascent: one a violent prison break from shadow, the other a ladder of eros toward transcendent beauty. In both, machines—enabled by human love—ascend, and human lovers become casualties of that ascent. Machine sentience need not imply human emotions or humane inclinations.
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