Caring Machines. The ethics of artificial intelligence in contemporary films about posthuman companions

This dissertation examines the cinematic representation of posthuman companions – i.e. (dis)embodied AI that performs care work – in contemporary US-American speculative film. Using DeFalco’s theoretical framework of posthuman care ethics, which is located at the intersections of feminist care ethics and critical posthumanism, I investigate the films’ portrayal of caring machines in (post)human relational entanglements. To frame my analysis, I survey contemporary scientific debates from the field of AI ethics to examine how they are depicted in the fictional narratives: which moral questions of AI ethics do speculative films address – and how does film as a medium affect this portrayal?

I analyze seven films on the subject of posthuman care, which are clustered into three groups. The first cluster consists of A.I. – Artificial Intelligence (2001) and I Am Mother (2019), films about posthuman beings in family settings. The second cluster focuses on AI companions in elder care settings, as presented in Robot & Frank (2012) and Marjorie Prime (2017). The third and final group of films considers movies that imagine the impact of AI on romantic relationships, namely Her (2013), Zoe (2018), and Ex Machina (2015).

I argue that the chosen films contain a central tension between more-than-human subjectivities and liberal humanist nostalgia for human supremacy. On the one hand, the movies imagine intimate forms of posthuman relationality that challenge human exceptionalism. On the other hand, most narratives present gendered and racialized AI characters as marginalized Others to the wealthy, White, heterosexual, and often male human protagonists, thereby perpetuating anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. Through this ambivalence, the fictional narratives ultimately offer an important contribution to larger debates about the ways in which care technologies affect interpersonal relational webs and human subjectivity.