ALEX GARLAND HAS quickly established
himself as science fiction master. He made Oscar
Isaac dance with a robot inEx Machina. He made
Natalie Portman fight an alien mutant bear in
Annihilation. And now he’s tackling some big,
beefy philosophical inDevs, his first TV drama.
Set “ten minutes into the future”, it hinges
around Forest (Nick Offerman),the enigmatic
leader ofthe world’s most powerful tech
company, Amaya, as he tries to unlock a powerful
secret: how to predict the future. As you’d expect
from Garland, it should raise some big questions.DO WE HAVE FREE WILL?
Central to the show is whether technology could
get so advanced that it could knoweverything.
“The more I looked into it, the more sceptical
I became about the idea of free will,” says
Garland. “There’s little evidence of things that
do not have a direct cause-and-effect link. It
came partly from living in a world incredibly
dominated by tech companies,” he explains,
“but also a scientific concept with philosophical
implications: do we live in a deterministic
universe? If so, the consequence would be that
we have no free will — just the illusion of free
will.” Stretching this further, as the show does,
if all actions are the effect of a cause, then, with
a big enough computer and the right code, you
could theoretically know everything that has
happened, or will happen. This is Forest’s quest.DOES NO FREE WILL MEAN NO RESPONSIBILITY?
It’s an omelette that requires some sacrificialeggs. The first characters we meet are Lily
(Sonoya Mizuno, AKA the dancing robot from
Ex Machinaand a Garland regular) and Sergei
(Karl Glusman), a couple who both work at
Amaya and who each find themself in varying
degrees of danger. Forest forgives both others
and himself for acts that are ostensibly wrong
because, if we have no free will, we bear no
responsibility for our actions. But with total
absolution, surely there is chaos?
“It absolves you of responsibility but it
doesn’t remove morality,” says Garland. “It’s
an important distinction. If someone mugs
someone, it’s not a good act. But if both their
parents were junkies and by 12 they’re a junkie,
too, you know that this was a life path they didn’t
choose and which clearly led to their actions.”IS TECHOLOGY NOW A RELIGION?
Forest’s path seems to lead to certain madness
after gaining godlike knowledge that no
individual could handle. He’s already the most
powerful man on Earth and yet he seeks more.
It’s a God complex.
“A lot of tech leaders have a way of
presenting themselves — and are perceived by
people — as messianic,” says Garland. “Objects
like telephones start to have the qualities of
religious icons, so people buy into the idea
that there’s something very special about the
keeper of the secrets of the wonderful machine.
They are the speakers of the truth that have
a special wisdom, which you can attach yourself
to if you follow them.”IS TECHNOLOGY AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT?
Devs’longer form will allow Garland to dive
deeper than ever into these questions, as will
the near-future setting. He sees science-fiction
as a “safer” way of discussing issues because
people rarely have a position on things that don’t
exist (“It relaxes the audience because they’re
dealing with essentially a fantasy world”). So
does he see tech as an existential threat?
“No, not really,” he says. “Some people took
Ex Machinaas a warning about the dangers of
AI,but the person that I would warn in that film is
therobot. I don’t see warning people as being my
job. My job is to find interesting ideas and make
an interesting story about it.”ANDREW DICKENSDEVSIS COMING TO BRITISH TV LATER THIS YEARAnd the other big questions director Alex Garland
is asking in his new sci-fi showDEVS
No. / 16
Do we have
free will?
Above, top to bottom: Lily (Sonoya Mizuno) and Forest
(Nick Offerman); Lily looks pensive; Forest: Saint or sinner?Alamy, Photofest, ShutterstockPREVIEW