In the films we’ve watched and books we’ve read, technology complex human/machine hybrids have been successfully made. However, it seems that it many cases the focus is not placed on how great this initial achievement is but rather trying to socialize the cyborg and make it recognizable to the outside world as strictly ordinary, almost stripping the cyborg of it’s uniqueness as a hybrid

An important statement brought up by Shira was when she said to Yod “there is no culture of cyborgs for you to fit into. The only society is human”(p.238). Cyborgs are not completely human, but also not completely machine. In both He she and it and Ex Machina the creator makes a conscious decision to have their cyborg more closely resemble a human than a machine- there is no in between since there is no pre-existing concept of a cyborg in both the world of He She and It and Ex machina.

Imposing human standards on Yod and Ava are essentially the main plot of both the novel and the film. Both instances also involve a real human to enhance the cyborgs human features. In He she and It Shira introduces Yod to human life from teaching him how to interact with others to helping him learn how to interpret emotions. Yod is always concerned that Shira is disgusted with him and that he is chasing something that he is not capable of “Am I pretending at something I’ll always fail?” (p.238). This dissatisfaction comes from the fact that Yod is intelligent enough to be self-aware, and understand that he will never be perfectly human. Yod’s evolution from primarly machine to primarily human is what causes him to ultimately go against Avram and destroy himself and Avram’s lab. This decisions satisfied his programmed goal to protect Tikva but also protect those he learned to love and society as a whole, values that came to him as he developed as a human. In Ex Machina the viewer is mislead at first into thinking that Ava is truly developing human like feelings for Caleb, but then we find out that Nathan programmed Ava to use Caleb as a tool to escape. In the end Ava sucessfully escapes, and it is evident that any feelings she portrayed were to accomplish her mission. Since in the end Ava prioritized her programmed mission, it shows that Ava is more machine than she is human- unlike Yod whose emotions influenced his decisions.