Although the characters in her novel are split along a human/computer divide, the “robot uprising” that Ravn depicts does not categorically target the human world. In her new novel, The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century, Olga Ravn stages a decidedly different dynamic. The harder it becomes to tell machines apart from humans, the more threatening their imbrication in our lives becomes. As a result, many of these narratives rest on the central antagonism between human beings and nonhuman machines.

Yet, as the films above demonstrate, this question about whether computers can think - and, if so, how they might act on these thoughts - has been at the heart of many science-fictional imaginings of the future.

When Alan Turing first proposed his eponymous Turing test in 1950, he tried to reframe the question “Can computers think?” into a more unambiguous counterpart: “Can computers imitate human thinking?” He argued that imitation, rather than the nature of thought itself, could be more easily measured, which would in turn lead to a more scientific understanding of the nature of artificial intelligence.

With this fear comes another: what if we stop being able to tell the difference between artificial intelligence and the human intelligence that created it? The trope of the “robot uprising” has been a feature of science fiction for decades, reflecting a shared cultural fear that the seemingly unrestrained advancement of technology may land us in a world where our computers bite back. HAL’S ATTEMPTED MUTINY aboard the Discovery One in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) the replicants’ rejection of their imposed four-year lifespan in Blade Runner (1982) the Terminator’s principal mission throughout James Cameron’s franchise and, more recently, Ava’s murderous betrayal in Ex Machina (2014).

The employees ravn