Apricot Canning

"But you are human, human as I could make you."-- William Hurt, before embracing the garrulous conservative approach.

The British android series Humans doesn’t bring anything new to the table. In the SO2 climax, Laura’s mildly insistent argument to the actor performing Hester was an apologia to the viewing audience for the fact that we can only approximate what we hope sentient machines will be like. The actress in Ex Machina does a little better, merely observing the death of her creator. The geek who freed her had scruples, in the movie’s initial inclination toward sympathy. The end is ambiguous, mildly chilling—but we still don’t really comprehend the issues inherent in AI creation. Forbes had an interesting backstory piece about Bell Labs technical secrets leading to the behemoths of our 21^st century anxieties: Apple, Google, Facebook, and the government’s drive to break AT&T into component spinoffs might serve as a warning to the Big Three. What we might also consider, however, is that we don’t need Hal, Arnold Schwartzenegger, or Spielberg’s sentimental AI romance to be alarmed at the human digital interface already having something of a negative impact. Computer processing as it already exists sets off sequential events with detrimental results. Do we want drone technology and drone kills to eliminate human pilots? Or facial recognition software to turn the planet into a quantum prison? Despite William Hurt’s ostensible cameo, allowing the audience to pit the British no nonsense sensibility against AI’s grandiosity, comparing David with Odi, and their inadvertent threat, Humans is more or less an English domestic quarrel with diversity and its economic caste system. Leo Elster, if not an anemic beatnik, looks like an exhausted punk who’s lost the nerve to be crude. Niska is the outraged feminist who goes butch, making a rather huge leap, conceptually, into simulated incest. The writers don’t really trouble themselves with how a self-aware android would intuit penetration as a violation, or even why Mia and Hester pursue sexual objectives, proletarian as they are, the caretaker and exploited chemical worker. The actor who embodies the Beatrice/Karen composite puts in a sturdy performance as a woman divided between domestic tranquility and despair, the least autonomic of the prototypes, hence improbable.

Since Asimov inflicted readers with the moral dilemma of robotic awareness in the mid-20^th century, machines are either victimized children or a malevolent efficiency model. In Terminator, the machines are DOD systems which eliminated most of human civilization, then came up with time travel to ensure the resistance did not survive Siri’s destruction. Granted, the saga is simply an action thriller with characters to root for, but we never ask if machines designed for combat would be so relentless, and we might wind up with something quite different if we bring these things to life, an alien mindset that doesn’t mirror and magnify human behavior. I am not saying I was unmoved by the story line of the series, but we’ve seen it all before, trapped by our own anthropomorphic tendencies. If Terminator offers a sliver of hope against the hubris of the military industrial complex, and The Matrix is a futurist parable warning us not to be too caught up in technical optimism, Humans has faith we’ll remain true to our core values in the age of Google, with a Zuckerberg-like CEO trying to make happiness just that much less effortless. Uh huh.