Images Cinema Williamstown, MA
Dr. Tim J. Lebestky
Associate Professor of Biology, Chair of Neuroscience Program, Williams College
andDr. Christophe A. Koné
Associate Professor of German, Director of Oakley Center for Humanities & Social Sciences; Faculty Fellow of the Davis Center and the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Williams College
I'm Your Man— A.I.: The Stepford Man
Program Description
Is it okay for technology to be designed to give humans exactly what we want? In what ways might that “ruin us” for human relationships?
All four films in our A.I. series have some throughlines with each other that will call forward and backward week-to-week, comparing and contrasting evolving genre tropes and thematic variations.
Presented At
Images Cinema Williamstown, MA
Film Synopsis
In order to obtain research funds for her studies, a scientist accepts an offer to participate in an extraordinary experiment: for three weeks, she is to live with a humanoid robot, created to make her happy.
Alma (Maren Eggert) is a scientist coerced into participating in an extraordinary study in order to obtain research funds for her work. For three weeks, she must live with a humanoid robot tailored to her character and needs, whose artificial intelligence is designed to be the perfect life partner for her. Enter Tom (Dan Stevens), a machine in human form created solely to make her happy. A playfully romantic tale, I’M YOUR MAN questions what love and longing really mean in the modern age.
Photo credit: Bleecker Street
About the Speaker
Tim Lebestky is the Chair of the Neuroscience program at Williams College, and a professor in the Biology Department. His research seeks to understand the underlying circuits and modulators for illness related behaviors. Professor Lebestky also teaches courses about the neurobiology of emotion in humans and animal models, and is interested in how these internal states change or motivate behaviors, and how they translate into artificial intelligence systems.
Christophe Koné is Associate Professor of German at Williams College and the director of the Oakley Center for Humanities and Social Sciences. At Williams since 2013, Koné has taught several German language and literature classes. His research interests include German Romanticism, the European Avant-garde, Modernism, film studies, art history, comics and fashion studies. He is the author of Uncanny Creatures: Doll Thinking in Modern German Culture (July 2024, University of Michigan Press), an investigation of doll artifacts in the German-speaking world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.