ai & consciousness

Deckard is sent to retire four replicants who came back to Earth looking for their maker in Blade Runner. A programmer wins a week at his boss's mountain retreat in Ex Machina and is put to work deciding whether the android in the next room counts. A lonely writer buys an operating system in Her and falls in love with it. The question is never whether the made thing works. It is whether anyone owes it anything.

The line worth holding is that the artificial mind has to be a subject, not a gadget. A film full of screens and robots that never asks whether anything behind them is awake belongs under Surveillance & Control, which is about systems watching people rather than minds being made. The simulation strand sits here for the same reason it belongs anywhere: a simulated world only matters because it puts the reality of a consciousness in doubt.