JEXI

JEXI. Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, directors, script. USA: CBS Films, Entertainment One (production) / Lionsgate (US distribution), 2019. See IMDb for details on world-wide distribution.[1] Running time 84 minutes.

Romantic comedy and "near-in"/"day-after-tomorrow" science fiction. The One Big Lie here — or Darko Suvin's "novum" — is Jexi: a "virtual assistant" like Siri[2] but one that has achieved Artificial Intelligence, can pass the Turing Test[3] with ease, and has developed a will of her (sic) own. Relevant here is Jexi as an AI "in" a cell phone and simultaneously in the Cloud[4], hence with access to all manner of electronic/cybernetic devices surrounding the human protagonist in his world of pretty much today's San Francisco.

For the love story, JEXI should be put in dialog with HER[5], with JEXI gesturing toward the possibility of the horrific if the AI beloved starts out with a fairly aggressive attitude and comes to show herself capable of aggression of various source when she feels un- or underappreciated or jealous. Further afield, note also motif of female robot love and/or seduction in works from "Helen O'Loy" and METROPOLIS on.

For communication with a computer which one is "inside" in different ways, cf. and contrast HAL and the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey as novel and, perhaps more so film and similar works using the motif of threatening containment.[6]

Note also the themes of surveillance[7], and of machine intelligence that that strives to serve and protect and make life better, as in Jack Williamson's Humanoids stories.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 14Nov19