‘Lifts are female; the Tube announcer is female; most people prefer a female satnav. “When you ask people what they want, they use code words like ‘approachable’ or ‘relatable’. They mean subservient,” she told me. “They also want breathiness, which is a marker of sexual arousal.” In other words, even though the advent of artificial intelligence is heralded as an era of change, it is likely to reproduce the same old crappy gender dynamics.’
– on Alex Garland’s Ex Machina: can a film about an attractive robot be feminist science fiction?