But take heed of Joy’s words to Simone, who tracks her down thanks to that repetitive glitch we kept hearing when she’d talk to the app via proxy, culminating in that big serenade of “Electric Avenue.” (That’s where Joy lives.) Mrs. Davis isn’t a she, Joy says, but an it. Algorithms aren’t a form of life; they’re code. They don’t have subconsciouses; they have subroutines. They don’t have mothers; they have coders. It’s not just that the quest Mrs. Davis assigned to Simone is dumb; it’s that all algorithms are “super dumb.”
This is the kind of energy we need in 2023, as our tech and business overlords try to convince us that AI is learning, growing, and experiencing organisms capable of replacing virtually all human endeavors. They’re just moronic computer programs that plagiarize Wikipedia and make pictures of fake people with 17 fingers. That’s it! Algorithms are not inevitable, and they don’t have intelligence, not any more than Pong was an Olympic table-tennis champion.
The episode’s problem — the whole show’s problem, in fact — is that its valuable insights kind of begin and end there.
I reviewed the season (series?) finale of Mrs. Davis for Vulture.
Tags: mrs. davis, reviews, TV, TV reviews, vulture