What is it like to be Ava? Minds and Misrecognition in Ex Machina

What is it like to be Ava? Minds and Misrecognition in Ex Machina

Kelly Coble

Baldwin Wallace University

Abstract

Alex Garland’s 2014 science-fiction film Ex Machina adopts an ingenious narrative structure to explore epistemological and ethical challenges arising from the prospect of synthetic consciousness. How do we avoid errors of misattribution, and what are our obligations toward conscious machines? Framed as an ongoing Turing Test with existential stakes, the story invites the viewer to ask how one can reliably determine whether Ava, a sophisticated gynoid robot, is conscious. It also dramatizes predictable harms resulting from interactions between flawed (male) human beings and presumptively conscious machines (in female form). As I show, the film neatly illustrates the shortcomings of the Turing test and the advantages of the embodied-AI paradigm for testing consciousness. More significantly, by adopting the perspective of Caleb, a young male coder charged with testing Ava for consciousness, the story dramatizes the mechanisms and ethical consequences of misrecognition—in Caleb’s case, the inability to fathom the scope of Ava’s alterity. While Caleb’s misrecognition is animated by distinctly libidinal interests, it is symptomatic of a broader tendency to anthropomorphize consciousness, to treat evidence of consciousness as evidence of humanness. I discern this tendency in influential discussions of AI consciousness by Susan Schneider and David Chalmers: both philosophers underestimate the distance between probable forms of synthetic consciousness and human consciousness. Noting the pervasiveness of feelings and emotions in human subjective experience, I elucidate the links between human consciousness, embodiment and life. The dimension of affective experience, I argue, is what most sets human consciousness apart from (likely forms of future) synthetic consciousness. But resolving questions about the moral status of intelligent, presumptively self-conscious machines lacking this dimension of affective experience is no simple matter.

About the Author

Kelly Coble is Professor of Philosophy at Baldwin Wallace University. He has written on Kant, 19^th– and 20^th-century German philosophy, and 20^th-century European literature. Kelly is pursuing a project that underscores our ecological animality as humans, setting critical boundaries around self-descriptions as cyborgs, envattable brains, and uploadable minds. Kelly has taught at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, and was most recently a visiting researcher at the Universidad del Azuay in Cuenca, Ecuador. Kelly plays the guitar and sings in an old-time string band.

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Published: 2025 – 07 – 01