The blurring of the boundary between man and machine is nothing new to science fiction or the reality of our everyday lives, our dependence on electricity and an addiction to electronic gadgetry, some of it vintage.

A while back I described the “robotic” feel of an electric (typebar) typewriter …

You can grow to like an electric typewriter, but you can’t fall in love with it. That’d be like falling in love with a robot, which is ludicrous …

… but not impossible.

I fell in love with a robot while watching the 2015 British sci-fi movie Ex Machina (spoiler alert) …

If you haven’t seen it:

Ex Machina tells the story of programmer Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) who is invited by his employer,  the eccentric billionaire Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence, named Ava (Alicia Vikander).

But it wasn’t Ava I fell in love with, it was Sonoya Mizuno, who played the robot Kyoko ...

“Nathan, you mad fool, you had perfection!”

Latex-clad silver machines? Far-fetched?

It’s closer than you think. Walk down any high street and you’ll see them. They’ve passed the Turing test and are waiting …

… waiting for humanity to fail the Trump test, before they take over the world!