March 2020 was an inauspicious time, I think we can agree. This may be why Devs, an eight-part sci-fi series by Alex Garland that debuted as the world went into lockdown, didn't attract as large an audience as it could have – we certainly had other things to worry about. I was, I confess, one of the many people who missed it. There are lots of reasons why I have recently rectified that: Garland was on my mind after watching 28 Years Later, for which he wrote the screenplay, and the cold, dark world of Devs was also the perfect antidote to the heatwave this column was written under. But the main reason is that five strange years have passed since the show aired, and I was intrigued to see how it looked, at half a decade's remove.

A24's latest sci-fi drama, After Yang, shows a very strange minimalist future in which technology has superseded our desire or need for human connection. The plot of the film follows a suburban family's never tiring attempts to repair their synthetic humanoid child named Yang, who short-circuits after a televised home family dance competition. With many movies about artificial intelligence, the creators like Kogonada (who directed After Yang) are simply trying to communicate to humanity in all of us. So, get your popcorn and tissues ready because we are going into the list of the 5 best movies like After Yang, about heartbreaking artificial intelligence stories. Synopsis: Set in Los Angeles, in the near future, Her follows Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a complex, soulful man who makes his living writing touching, personal letters for other people.

RICHARD DAWKINS: When we come to artificial intelligence and the possibility of their becoming conscious, we reach a profound philosophical difficulty. I am a philosophical naturalist; I'm committed to the view that there is nothing in our brains that violates the laws of physics, there's nothing that could not, in principle, be reproduced in technology. It hasn't been done yet; we're probably quite a long way away from it, but I see no reason why in the future we shouldn't reach the point where a human-made robot is capable of consciousness and of feeling pain. JOANNA BRYSON: So, one of the things that we did last year, which was pretty cool, the headlines, because we were replicating some psychology stuff about implicit bias--actually, the best one is something like'Scientists show that AI is sexist and racist and it's our fault,' which, that's pretty accurate because it really is about picking things up from our society. Anyway, the point was, so here is an AI system that is so humanlike that it's picked up our prejudices and whatever and it's just vectors.

Since Fritz Lang gave us'false Maria' in 1927's landmark sci-fi film Metropolis, robots have terrified and fascinated moviegoers in equal measure. With the release of Alex Garland's Ex Machina, Michael Hogan picks his top 20 films (in no particular order); including Star Wars, The Terminator, Star Trek and Blade Runner; that star A.I. beings who have challenged what it means to be human.

From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Blade Runner and RoboCop to The Matrix, how humans deal with the artifical intelligence they have created has proved a fertile dystopian territory for film-makers. More recently Spike Jonze's Her and Alex Garland's forthcoming Ex Machina explore what it might be like to have AI creations living among us and, as Alan Turing's famous test foregrounded, how tricky it might be to tell the flesh and blood from the chips and code. These concerns are even troubling some of Silicon Valley's biggest names: last month Telsa's Elon Musk described AI as mankind's "biggest existential threat… we need to be very careful". What many of us don't realise is that AI isn't some far-off technology that only exists in film-maker's imaginations and computer scientist's labs. Many of our smartphones employ rudimentary AI techniques to translate languages or answer our queries, while video games employ AI to generate complex, ever-changing gaming scenarios.