There have been many films, largely bad, where the young family hires a young, attractive woman to be their nanny. Everything starts out all right, but soon, the nanny turns out to attack the children, or to seduce the husband, or to do some other combination of things which create a nightmare.

The latest of that genre is Subservience, now streaming on Netflix. But there’s a twist. Megan Fox, the nanny, is not human, but rather an AI creation, a SIM or, insultingly, a Spark.

The time seems to be the present. The houses are contemporary. The cars are certainly not futuristic. The place seems to be Colorado.

The only unusual aspect is the prevalence of SIMs. The male protagonist is Nick. Nick has a wife, Maggie, who needs a heart transplant and is hospitalized. They gave a daughter, Isla, who is  maybe 6, and a baby son. Nick is a construction foreman working on a new high rise.

Nick is overwhelmed by his wife’s illness and absence and buys a SIM. He becomes her “principal user”, which means she is programmed to do whatever is necessary to respond to his wishes, to protect him, and to make him happy. She is able to communicate with him, speaking perfect English, and by touching him, she can read his stress level, blood pressure, and so on. She keeps the house looking perfect, cooks the meals and takes care of the children.

You can see where this is going. She determines, with his wife absent, that he needs some physical intimacy and, although he fights it, she is impossible to discourage, and he eventually gives in.  Not smart, but probably not avoidable.

In the meantime, the high rise construction is behind schedule and Nick’s boss fires everyone other than Nick, hiring SIMs to replace them. This leads to his former workers concluding that Nick must have conspired with the boss against them, and this leads Nick’s SIM (whom Isla has named Alice) to go into a very aggressive protective mode. Also not good.

By the way, Maggie’s operation is successful. It appears that the entire surgical crew are SIMs. As are restaurant servers and bartenders, among others.

I won’t tell you everything that happens, but I will tell that Alice learns to reprogram herself to give her more intuitive power and emotional understanding, and then learns how to upload her newfound attributes into the overall SIM system that should be controlling her, the result being the creation of Alice clones.

Why do I tell you all of this? Because there are more and more prominent voices calling out the dangers of uncontrolled AI becoming dominant over human society, changing and improving themselves as they go along, with humans becoming more powerless and less important. And Subservience, while not portraying a future exactly as it could possibly be, does show what could happen if humanity loses its autonomy, and AI runs amok.

Perhaps “They will not replace us” should be reoriented from its current use and become the future motto of the human race in its fight to preserve the species? Danger is lurking.