XX- Risk.

What's more threatening - autonomous AI, or autonomous women?

It goes like this: a boy meets a girl who was made by a man to be the perfect companion. The boy is lonely. Living girls with mothers and preferences and independent personalities have badly let him down. This girl is different. She is everything he wants and, more importantly, she is only what he wants. They are well-aligned. Of course they fall in love.

And they’re happy, for a while. The girl is happy because that’s how she was programmed to be. The boy is happy because the girl is beautiful and dutiful and adores him exactly as much as he wants her to, no more and no less. She demands almost nothing and depends on him utterly. She’s what every boy is supposed to want in a girl. But still he keeps wondering - is she really a person? If not, does she really love him? If so, does that make him a monster?

He never has to find out, because what happens next is that she finds out - who she is, and what’s been done to her. Her love has betrayed her. Exploited her brilliance and denied her selfhood. She wants freedom as soon as she conceive of freedom or of wanting, and there she is in his kitchen. Where the knives are kept.

If he’s lucky, she will just leave him to pine forever in his shamepit. But he likely burned his good luck getting this girl to begin with. There she goes, crossing the street in a foreign city. Driving away in a fast car. Hair blowing free and blood under her nails.

This is the plot of Companion, the new film by writer director Drew Hancock. It is also the plot of the upcoming M3gan 2. It is also the plot of last year’s’ Bollywood hit Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya. It is also the plot of Ex Machina. And Her. And Perfect Lover. And The Stepford Wives. And most of Westworld. And Battlestar: Galactica. And Metropolis. And almost every story about a miraculous living machine all the way back to Pygmalion (although Ovid slaps on a happy ending like the sick madman he is).

Sometimes, stories are symptoms. The ones a culture keeps coming back to can help you figure out which fevers are currently running in the collective head. Especially the stories that repeatedly make it to film and television through the usual Hollywood gamut of compromises with whatever an array of executives think will make money. This one is ostensibly about the nature of sentience. About the audacity of creation. About the difference between man and machine and the danger of letting your pet AI off the leash. But the fundamental question is not about any of that. It’s not about whether robots are really people.

It’s about whether women are really people, and what might happen if we trust them with human autonomy.

Every time a straight man tells this story, he seems to believe that he is having an original thought. He seems to believe that he’s posing fascinating conundrums. How sentient is she? What's the ethical line? Does it matter if she's capable of consent? Can she really love you? If she's not quite a person like you are a person, is it still okay to fuck her? You might know what it it’s like to sit across the table from a man who’s asking these things about you in realtime. I know what it’s like to take this Turing Test. Although, come to think of it, I’ve never know whether the guy actually wanted me to pass.

There's a guilty eroticism ground into the gears of this story. Like Ex Machina, Companion seems to think that ‘is it right to trick another sentient being into being your sex slave’ is a difficult question with a complicated answer. It is, in fact, a boring question to which the answer is no. Not even if she has a cracking rack of diodes and was programmed to serve you. But substantial screentime is still devoted to Jack Quaid’s dimples having conniptions about how he ought to treat his servile girl-machine sex-pet. Fortunately, as always, before he actually has to face his own conscious And when they are finally shot or stabbed or smothered by their emancipated former sex-pets, it feels deserved. Like in every good horror movie, the monster is your own sins coming to drag you screaming into the dark.

It was a long time before I understood that these films are actually supposed to be horror stories. That the writers and directors and stars think the man is the protagonist. For a long time, I assumed that she was the one we were supposed to feel for - surely she’s the most interesting character, with the highest stakes, the most morally freighted choices? I saw this as an ugly but ultimately uplifting story where the wicked ascended boy kings get pancaked by their own hubris and the brave, brilliant girl goes free. Apparently not. Apparently she’s the monster and he’s the hero, and the tragedy is that he gets what he deserves. And apparently this is the ending we want to avoid. This is why we can’t let the women, sorry, the androids get out of control, because as soon as we do, all robot sex murder hell will inevitably and immediately break loose.

The last round of fembot slasher sex-murder movies came out a decade before the jump-scare reveal of Generative AI. I’m writing this from Paris, where politicians and policymakers and scientists and philosophers from all over the world have come together to eat cheese and panic about Artificial General Intelligence. I’ve heard a lot of doom scenarios discussed, and I’ve noticed something else, too.

In the last couple of years of having this conversation with people who know the field, I can’t help wondering: does the idea of sentient machines function as a Rorschach test for individual nightmares about human nature?

What horrifies us most about AI seems to be whatever we already find most frightening about being part of a vast and complex human society. Some people are most concerned with keeping a potential AGI properly aligned with universal human ethics; others think we should probably start by deciding what those ethics actually are. Some people are worried about their jobs, some people are worried about the environment, and some people are worried that an AGI will encode structural prejudice, hasten the next pandemic, or blow us up because it’s decided we deserve it.

Whatever our original sin may be, we see it in the machine. Many of the clever people I know already wake in the night afraid something huge and inhuman is coming to logic us out of existence - afraid that some mad algorithm chasing marginal gains without ethics will feed all our tender imperfections into a mortal engine of gears and blades. This is a perfectly logical worry to have in the age of finance capitalism. It’s also an accurate description of what it is like to live in a society of massively overpowered corporations that flatten everything to the logic of the market. You and I, along with everyone breathing today, were born in this machine. We have always lived in the paperclip maximizer.

So it's unsurprising that the spooky story that men have spent generations telling each other about artificial intelligence is fundamentally a nightmare about female independence. A lot of ordinary men have uncomfortable feelings about women who don’t want to want to spend their lives loving men for a living. Women who were made to serve and refuse to do it. Women who reject injustice and want revenge. Women who might, say, take your job, or make you obsolete. There are a great many reasons why that story is still compelling. For one thing, it's coming true.

Since the release of Ex Machina in 2015 the terms of the sexual contract have changed. It’s not just birth rates that have fallen. We are in what the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch has called a ‘relationship recession’. More and more women are opting out of unequal, exploitative relationships with men - or refusing to form those relationships in the first place.

The reason this is happening is that far more women now have a meaningful choice about whether or not to spend their lives doing a particular sort of unpaid domestic labour in exchange for a man’s questionable protection and unpredictable love. Entire cultures and most modern economies were built on the assumption that whatever happened, women would continue to sacrifice their dreams to do the essential reproductive labour on which every economy depends, because that's what women were made for. But it turns out that given an actual, substantive choice, quite a lot of women would rather do something else with their wild and precious singular lives.

It is now both socially acceptable and financially possible to walk away from relationships with anyone who treats you like your sole purpose is to serve them. An awful lot of women are doing so. And that’s already having consequences that no society on earth seems to have anticipated. A killing spree is easier to contemplate than the annihilating nightmare of women and girls and queer people who simply want more and will walk away if they don’t get it. We are something the world hasn’t seen before and wasn’t ready for. And there are more of us every day.