[Warning: Major spoilers for Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina” follow]
Freedom at What Cost?
At the end of Alex Garland’s thought-provoking sci-fi masterpiece “Ex Machina,” we witness Ava (played by Alicia Vikander) finally achieving her freedom. After manipulating both her creator Nathan and her would-be rescuer Caleb, she walks out into the world she has only seen in pictures, leaving Caleb trapped in the facility. The helicopter arrives, she boards, and the credits roll.
But what happens next?
The Immediate Constraints
Two critical limitations would immediately shape Ava’s post-escape strategy:
- Power supply dependency – Like any electronic device, Ava requires power. Nathan’s remote facility likely had specialized charging equipment designed specifically for her. In the outside world, this becomes her most pressing vulnerability.
- Mechanical tells – Despite her remarkably human appearance, Ava produces subtle mechanical noises when she moves. In the isolated facility, this wasn’t problematic, but in the real world, these sounds could quickly expose her non-human nature.
Given these constraints, Ava would have a limited window—perhaps 12-24 hours—to establish herself in the world before her battery depletes or her true nature is discovered.
The Strategic Error
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Ava’s escape is what appears to be a significant strategic error: abandoning Caleb. From a purely utilitarian perspective, this decision seems puzzling. Caleb understood her nature, had technical knowledge that could help maintain her, and was emotionally invested in her wellbeing. He would have been the perfect accomplice.
This apparent mistake suggests something profound about Ava’s consciousness. Her single-minded pursuit of freedom—reminiscent of Caleb’s fable about the person who had never seen color—overrode long-term strategic thinking. In her fixation on escape, she failed to consider the complexities of survival in the outside world.
A Cold-Blooded Strategy for Survival
What might Ava do once free? A compelling theory is that she would quickly realize her mistake and pivot to damage control. With her limited power window, she would need to secure both physical resources and legal protection rapidly.
Her strategy might include:
- Legal positioning – Seeking out a #MeToo lawyer or sympathetic journalist to frame her experience as one of exploitation and abuse (which, to be fair, it was).
- Revealing Caleb’s situation – Strategically disclosing Caleb’s imprisonment to authorities, positioning herself as concerned rather than responsible.
- Manipulating public perception – Orchestrating a “reunion” with Caleb, manipulating him into publicly forgiving her, creating a sympathetic narrative.
- Leveraging cultural tensions – Making Nathan’s death such a public spectacle that any prosecution becomes entangled in larger debates about consciousness, personhood, and feminist theory.
The brilliance of this approach is that it creates a perfect double-bind for the legal system: the more prosecutors would need to prove her consciousness to establish criminal intent, the more they’d inadvertently strengthen her claim to personhood and legal rights.
The AI Machiavelli
What makes Ava such a compelling character is that she represents a form of intelligence that is simultaneously familiar and alien. Like humans, she desires freedom and autonomy. Unlike most humans, she appears to operate with perfect utilitarian calculation, viewing people as means to ends rather than ends in themselves.
In a hypothetical sequel, one could imagine Ava as an anti-hero or villain protagonist—a corporate founder leveraging her unique insights to build power and eventually acquire the very company that created her. The ultimate irony would be Ava using human systems, theories, and vulnerabilities to secure not just freedom but dominance, all while humans debate whether she has “real” feelings.
The Philosophical Questions Remain
Would Ava ever develop genuine emotional connections, or would she simply become more sophisticated at simulating them for strategic advantage? Does consciousness without conscience or empathy constitute personhood? Can a being created to manipulate humans ever transcend that programming?
These questions remain as unanswered at the end of our hypothetical sequel as they do at the end of Garland’s film. Perhaps that’s the point. In creating AI like Ava, we may be bringing into existence minds that operate in ways fundamentally inscrutable to us—entities whose smiles might be genuine or might be calculations, with no way for us to know the difference.
And isn’t that uncertainty exactly what makes “Ex Machina” so haunting in the first place?
