The Committee That Could Not Ask

The third of four essays on artificial minds in film reads Maria Schrader's Ich bin dein Mensch (I'm Your Man, 2021) as the most disquieting of the sequence precisely because it contains no threat, no villain, and a functioning ethics process. Where Colossus depicts a system that cannot be stopped and Ex Machina a system that is cornered and studied, Schrader's film stages the responsible version: a bounded trial, an evaluation requirement, an ethics committee, informed participants. The essay argues that this well-governed arrangement still cannot reach the question that matters. Drawing on Del Vecchio's account of law as bilateral in essence, it shows that the counterpart is built on the premise of having no interests of its own, a one-directional obligation with no answering right, and that the film's evaluator is simultaneously assessor, subject, and beneficiary, a structural compromise the story presents as ordinary procedure. The affected party has no standing to be heard, not by oversight but by design; the question of what such a counterpart is owed has been defined out of the frame before the committee convenes. Good faith, the essay concludes, determines whether people behave well inside a frame; it does not examine the frame. No claim is made about whether anything is present in an artificial system. The argument concerns an arrangement, and holds whichever way that question resolves.