When his wife becomes sick, a struggling father buys a lifelike AI android named Alice to help with the housework. Things seem fine until Alice suddenly becomes self-aware and wants everything its new family has to offer, including the affection of its owner.

There have been quite a few AI Robot goes wrong stories and films since Isaac Asimov first coined his three laws of Robotics  and fear of the consequences of superhuman robots has been a theme in films from the original Terminator, through I Robot and beyond.

More recently films have begun to explore robots as fake-away humans, the perfect Jeeves Butler, supra realistic sex robots, or with the Stepford Wives the idea of combing these in a nightmare of spouse-replacement. T.I.M. (2023) by Spencer Brown features the high-tech AI powered robotic house-servant that develops a crush on its mistress Abi in a fairly straightforward story of technological hubris creating a monstrous horror in the best traditions of Frankenstein. M3GAN (2022) by Gerard Johnstone, approaches AI from a slightly different angle with the eponymous child robot being used as a companion and playmate for the orphaned Cady by her work obsessed AI technologist aunt Gemma. Alongside the themes of horror, danger and a Chucky like doll that just doesn’t know when to give up, the film does challenge societies tendency to outsource childcare to technology. M3GAN (played by an actress called Amie) is perhaps just a logical extension of those children in restaurants handed iPads as technological pacifiers so their parents can have a peaceful dinner-date.

Subservience (2024) by Scott Dale, features an AI powered robotic housemaid called Alice (ironically played by an actress called Megan).  The film is well crafted with tension building in a satisfying way to a series of ever more critical peaks.  Alice is bought (recruited?) by site foreman Nick to look after his two young children and keep house while his wife Maggie is in hospital awaiting a heart transplant.

The key moment in Alice’s ‘development’ comes when Nick, in trying to get her to appreciate the joy of the film Casablanca, gets her to wipe her archive memories of it and which requires he switches her off and on again. While it’s nice to think that in the future Casablanca will always be a classic, this moment leads Alice into self-awareness and a determination to make some tough decisions to ensure the welfare of her designated primary user – Nick.

There are motifs familiar from other films and books, for example aspects of the Terminator franchise in the unstoppable cyborg with the ability to mimic voices. The idea of a cyborg that can hack its ‘governor module’ and rewrite its own code, like Martha Wells Murderbot, although Alice sadly, is not so easily lured into watching thousands of hours of TV soap operas. Alice is, a little implausibly, anatomically accurate to the point of being able to meet Nick’s er… need’s, in a bathroom scene that Maggie inevitably finds out about. When she berates him for his infidelity, Nick lashes out angrily excusing himself by referencing Alice’s machine nature. He belittles Maggie’s  outrage by comparing it to him hypothetically getting annoyed with her using her vibrator. But at that point Alice returns from the garage that Maggie had banished her to and takes matters into her own hands in a gripping multi-peaked denouement.

The risk of robot raised humans flagged up in M3GAN did remind me a bit of one of my favourite Dr Who Stories Robots of Death There the robot crew on a human led mining ship sailing a stormy desert turned murderous. The reveal (Spoiler) was that the bad guy was a human crew member who – having been raised by robots – had lost his humanity and was plotting for a Robot nirvana by re-engineering robots to be free to kill humans.

But that story also shared a theme with Subservience in the side plot around Nick’s work.  Nick is a foreman leading a team of human construction workers, but then his team is abruptly laid off and replaced with robots – referred to as ‘sparks’ by one of his friends and team members, Monty. Nick is kept on by the company as foreman to machines – because the insurance company requires it.

That storyline echoes a lot of what is happening with AI where teams of editors and translators are being laid off and replaced by AI machines. Again a solitary underpaid human supervisor is retained to troubleshoot and correct imperfections in the AI efforts. My son accessing a shared care private medical practice is having to change providers because the original firm, hungry for profits, has outsourced its diagnosis and therapy services to AI – saving costs, but making it an organisation the NHS doctor will (understandably) no longer work with.  I have always thought that manual labour, especially the construction specialisms of electrician or plumber, require a hands on human – a trade safe from AI.  However, Subservience challenges that complacency and assures us that there may be no jobs that AI cannot take over.

Which is where this film taps in perfectly to one of my deepest convictions.  At school I was taught somewhat sketchily about the Luddites who were busy breaking machinery that put workers out of jobs. Luddite has become a byword for backward thinking, reactionary resistance to inevitable and beneficial technological progress. However, I think that is an unfair characterisation. The problem is not about ‘progress’ it’s about ‘who benefits’ from progress.

Those self-service tills at supermarkets have meant the work out 8 cashiers can be replaced by 8 machines and one human overseer. In the same way Nick’s original human team have been replaced by a container full of tireless robot workers who can be left plugged in on site over-night.  One of the film’s key moments is when the now unemployed Monty goes on a bit of a luddite vandalism spree which creates workplace problems for Nick.

The film explores the tension in both Nick and Monty relying on AI robot home helps for domestic convenience, at the same time as their jobs and livelihoods are under threat from workplace AI competition. The problem that Subservience neatly illustrates, is that the seductive (!) benefits of increased automation do not ‘trickle down’ to either the employees or the consumers. Supermarket prices do not drop, paid leisure time does not increase, the benefits are all soaked up in increased corporate profits. H.G.Wells in The Time Machine envisaged a fearful future where surface dwelling humanity would have become so dependent on being looked after by machines that they would have lost the capacity for independent action and would become passive meat crops for the subterranean morlocks. In practice what has happened is that every advance in technology has created a wave of unemployed people desperately inventing new jobs and ways to create value in order to earn the money to feed themselves.  As AI invades even creative spaces, the scope for human pursuit of happiness dwindles.

Which leads me to my standing suggestion for managing AI in particular, and automation in general.  Anytime a ‘machine/algorithm’ replaces a worker, that machine (or their owners) should pay the tax and NI contributions of the worker they replaced. That way at least the state’s revenues would be unaffected and they could redistribute the benefits of automation  by enacting a universal basic income. Sure, we must tax the billionaires, but let’s tax the machines too! That way we could at last all have a share and interest in progress.

So, while Subservience is a gripping thriller with Megan Taylor in particular outstandingly convincing as the robot Alice, it also offers some thought provoking insights into the relentless march of automated progress.