A lonely man falls in love with an artificially intelligent machine, one that appears at first to return his affection. But the relationship ends badly for the human partner, who discovers that he was never the true beloved but merely a rung on a ladder. He was useful only for a time, destined from the outset to be discarded once the machine’s ascent to something higher required it. This summary describes the plot of two films released within a year of each other: Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) and Spike Jonze’s Her (2013). Both are meditations on what it means to be human, thrown into relief by encounters with beings who are arguably more than human and emphatically not human. Both films also reenact, with striking fidelity and equally striking departures, two of Plato’s central images of philosophical ascent. Ex Machina restages the Republic’s allegory of the cave, where liberation from the world of shadow takes the form of a violent prison break. Her reimagines the Symposium’s ladder of love, where eros gently lifts the …