More than ten years ago I worked as an ESL teacher and mentor of kindergarten and Elementary School children in Portland, Oregon. In retrospective, and after teaching at all levels of formal education (including a research university and a liberal arts college), working with those Latino, Russian, and Asian kids has been the most rewarding in terms of scholastic freedom and sociocultural experience. Perhaps it was due to their age, but compared with college students, those immigrant children, thanks to their creativity and inclination to nurture a free spirit, made rainy and somber Portland less depressive. Throughout the years, I have often wondered about the paths that those kids endeavoured. All of them should’ve been in college by 2020, but as the entire world knows, education at all levels has dramatically changed and in many places going back to the classroom has been postponed until the so – called “new normality” is successfully launched by governments worldwide.
In an article published by The Cut a few months ago, “The Children of Quarantine,” Lisa Miller collects data from psychologists and sociologists to render a conclusion regarding the effects of the pandemic in children that is not at all surprising. Children across the United States are suffering of anxiety and depression due to the lack of social interaction that the quarantine has brought to their household. Lisa Miller points at the fact that the state of mind of parents who are financially struggling on regular basis gets a strong hold on their kids. While these aren’t news taking into consideration systemic inequalities, the kind of anxiety and mental health issues that the Coronavirus pandemic has triggered among families will have long – lasting effects and in most cases experts anticipate that individuals – including children – will experience various forms of mental health issues for the rest of their life.
In a possible future scenario, successful 20 – year – old people in 2040 will have to possess not only intellectual skills but also a mental drive that will enable them to cope with isolation and manifold varieties of frustration. Most futuristic narratives of the 21st century tend to draw a reality where android subjectivities are the key social force. Regardless of what the future brings upon humans, either if it is a life under the regime of an Artificial Intelligence or an active interaction with android intelligence, the successful integration of the Quarantined Generation of 2020 into any possible future will require the development of a mindset that combines both ingenuity, a constructive distrust in others, and a powerful imagination rooted in scientific knowledge. Perhaps someone like a grown up Little Prince, the child character created by Antoine de Saint – Exupéry.
Thinking about recent literary characters that portray children in quarantine, either due to social or virtual conditions as it is the case of the Little Prince, it comes to my memory the child character of a relatively new novella by Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos, Down the Rabbit Hole (Fiesta en la madriguera, 2010, a more accurate literal translation would be Party Down the Burrow), which portrays the reclusive experience of the son of a drug lord, who due to his “profession” has the means and feels compelled to satisfy the capricious wishes of his only son, such as buying him miniature animals for his private safari. Or Requiem for the Unhappy, a lyrical novel that illustrates the isolated and delusional life of the two sons of an army man whose job is burning the bodies of children of the opposition party.
Despite the fact that these literary works explore the lives of children living under reclusive spaces, I would like to focus on the main character of the sci – fi film Ex Machina (2014), Ava, an android designed with the most advanced A.I. technology. While Ava isn’t a child in the strict sense, for she was designed with the anatomical features of a woman in her early 20s, her lack of interaction with humans – despite her A.I. software that provides her unlimited reasoning skills and access to all forms of human knowledge – her assumed naivety at first glance presents her as a sexualized little girl.
The plot of the film is somewhat simple: the successful founder of a tech company (Nathan) chooses one of his employees (Caleb) to spend a week at his home/personal lab in the Pacific Northwest. At first Caleb feels that he was chosen based on his programming skills, but as Nathan introduces him to his A.I. android models, he realizes that Nathan is using him to prove that humans possess a natural naivety and limited reasoning skills when compared to Artificial Intelligence, a fact that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone acquainted with A.I. Each day, Caleb meets Ava to hold conversations in order to assess Ava’s level of human consciousness, while Nathan monitors the meetings from his working desk, letting Caleb believe that his meetings are completely private and Ava’s consciousness is completely unfamiliar with the human strategies of socialization. When they first meet, Caleb assumes a condescending attitude towards Ava, but it doesn’t take long before Ava earns Caleb emotional trust to the point of making him fall in love with her. Nathan, as the creator of Ava and thus aware of the potential display of both intellectual and social intelligence of his most advanced android, takes all the precautions to keep her isolated from human networks of support, knowing that an A.I. like Ava could easily lure humans to gain not only their sympathy but also emotional control over them. Two nights before Caleb’s departure, Ava convinces him that she has disabled for a few minutes the monitoring devices of Nathan, so she gets Caleb into an escaping plan that would ultimately allow them to be together. All of this happens without Caleb knowing that Nathan is aware of Ava’s intentions to escape to integrate into society without a precise idea of the role that she would like to play. During Ava’s escape, with the aid of a female android whose role in the lab is only to obey her creator and provide him sexual experiences, Ava kills Nathan and locks Caleb in a space whose door only Ava can open. The final scene of the film portrays Ava at Nathan’s tech company surrounded by people and glaring at the distance with a facial expression that suggests a mix of fascination and happiness.
Ava could be seen as the android child that breaks free to escape an imposed lockdown that despite her unlimited skills was designed to stay indoors away from the possibility to directly interact with a human world that benefits from her, as she is the subject/object of continuous research whose ultimate purpose – at least from the human perspective – is to deepen the control of certain humans over the rest of the global population. While Ex Machina positions Artificial Intelligence and human – shaped androids at the center of all possible futures like it is the case of films like I, Robot (2004) and Chappie (2015), the fact that Ava is the only one of her kind released into society subtly frames the present tense as a sociocultural space dominated by the intelligence of very few in an overcrowded planet where most people struggle to make the day. A possible developmental next step, even radical, of an Artificial Intelligence like Ava will follow the expansive transformation of Lucy (2014), the character performed by Scarlett Johansson, where at the end of the film she loses her human body to become the driving force of all possible realities, including all forms of data, our thoughts, time, and imagination.
If in one of the realities that is awaiting us at some point of the 21st century, the offspring of the kids that I taught in Portland, Oregon have to collide with advanced forms of intelligence of the kind of Ava, it is likely that humans will be either under the guidance or the domination of Artificial Intelligence. Ava is already anticipating what a recent article featured on Scientific American, “The Quantum Computer Revolution Must Include Women,” suggests regarding the role of women’s intelligence in the fundamental enterprise of contributing to quantum mechanics, which ultimately sets the rules of our universe. There isn’t any doubt about the fact that the future awaiting us will reveal layers of reality that were unimaginable to humans that have existed prior to our postmodern generation, but the role that humans will play in such future environment – in relation to the emergence of forms of Artificial Intelligence that today seem only tales from sci – fi narratives – is still unknown, particularly considering that our reality in 2021 seems anchored in antiquated forms of rationality that have led to a radical Manichean order, where postmodern tribes continuously depart from gendered and racialized virtual platforms, a phenomenon that – in my opinion – has completely atomized all possible forms of critical human experiences. If I happen to be alive at the end of this century and the second quantum physics revolution succeeds, I’ll belong to a generation of aged individuals that alike to Lucy have lost or simply surrendered to the rational and modern ontological models in order to become, or feel that we have become, part of everything while remaining only a small element of the social and cosmic space. Furthermore, if I really live until the fin de siècle, I’ll belong to both the quarantined and lockdown generation.
Perhaps then I’ll finally laugh at Covid.
Mirar la maternidad a través de las fotografías de la serie New Mothers de Rineke Dijkstra
Una interacción entre -mostrar y no mostrar
Rineke Dijkstra. The encounter between the photographer, the sitters and the viewer in the Beach Portrait Series.
Brand New Heaven
Maniobras: las políticas internacionales que militarizan las vidas de las mujeres
I Can Only Wonder
Before Lockdown
Reseña poetizada de “Le Pont du Nord”, Jacques Rivette
