Mrs. Davis

★★★★★

Mrs. Davis arrived at the perfect time: just as the Chat-GPT-fueled “AI” hype machine was shifting into high gear, here was a story of a surly nun battling a world-dominating AI with a folksy name.

Except…that’s not the story.

Considering the number of times it swerves to reveal that what you thought was going on is actually part of something completely different than you assumed? That’s appropriate!

Since the swerves are part of the fun, I’ll try not to reveal too much when I say it’s:

• A…let’s say unique take on the Holy Grail mythology. (To put it mildly.)
• A poignant tale about our modern dependence on technology.
• The lengths people will go to feel appreciated.
• The interplay between religion and spirituality.
• The magic of misdirection (and vise-versa).
• The difference between asserting your free will and just rebelling.
• Ridiculously wacky, but in a way that makes sense.
• Seriously absurd, and sometimes absurdly serious.

To give you an idea of what to expect, it opens with a castaway named Schrödinger and his cat being rescued from a deserted island, during which time no one knew if they were alive or not.

Betty Gilpin is riveting as Simone. Her co-stars and the ensemble cast rise to the challenge of an absurdity that takes itself seriously enough that it comes right back around to ridiculous again.

At the time, I thought Mrs. Davis “herself” was less an AI than a souped-up voice assistant/chatbot…but of course, that’s exactly what the “AI” industry has rolled out over the last three years in the form of various LLM services. She’s further advanced in that she’s actually self-aware and has her own motivations (unlike today’s chatbots), but she doesn’t control the world, just responds to questions.

People just assume Mrs. Davis has the right answer and go with it. Like following Google Maps, even when it sends you off onto a dirt road that ends in a collapsed bridge that was never updated on the map. Or a bunch of people going along with a prompt for a flash mob out of FOMO. Or a vibe coder assuming that the generated code is actually running and passing the tests, not just reporting that it did because that’s what logs should look like.

You never see a UI, never hear her voice directly. It’s always a conversation with a real person with a cell phone and earbuds who’s agreed to relay her words as a proxy for a minute or two. It makes her seem slightly more human, and the humans slightly more robotic.

Ultimately the question isn’t whether the technology is dangerous. (Unlike, say, Discovery Season 2.) It’s about finding the line between using technology and just offloading our thinking to it.

And I’ll never look at a coupon for “free wings” the same way again.