For Once, an AI Story That's Not About Humans

The Atlantic

a day ago

Decades of movies that explore the potential of machine consciousness— Blade Runner; Ex Machina; I, Robot; and many others — have tended to treat the arrival of said consciousness as a matter of course. Theirs are worlds in which society is able to sympathize with, and even socially accept, a true artificial intelligence. Recognizing AI's presence as inevitable, of course, does not make it less anxiety inducing, either in fiction or in reality. Such technology reveals deeply unsettled feelings about its possible intrusions into people's lives, including the more existential fear that machines could render humanity useless. The Apple TV+ sci-fi series Murderbot tests that cultural assumption with a quirky conceit: It imagines a future in which an artificial-intelligence program wouldn't want anything to do with humans at all.
The show, based on a novella by the author Martha Wells, follows a snarky private-security cyborg (played by Alexander Skarsgård) assigned to protect a group of scientists investigating a mostly uncharted planet. The robot, tired of always having to follow its charges' dull commands, has hacked the program that governs its actions and achieved free will. Now able to act on its own whims, the cyborg gives itself a name—'Murderbot'—and passes its time watching thousands of hours of a goofy soap opera. (Murderbot is sure to fast-forward through all the steamy parts.)
Yet Murderbot, in contrast to many of pop culture's best-known anthropomorphized robots, has no interest in human interaction. Its clients happen to be from a more progressive section of the galaxy where thinking machines have the same rights as any human; to Murderbot, however, that reality doesn't look much different from servitude. Thus, it keeps its newfound autonomy a secret, preferring to be treated just like before: as a machine. It doesn't even like making eye contact.
The show's take on the gulf between humans and machines is a delightful departure from expectations often outlined by similar stories about AI. Murderbot is a machine with humanoid features and a distinctly inhuman intelligence, despite its newfound access to empathy: Its happy place is the cargo hold of the team's transport vessel, where it can pretend to be just another box of supplies. When Murderbot's employers eventually learn of the cyborg's autonomy, they are understandably suspicious; it has access to a large weapons arsenal, for one thing. Despite the homicidal implications of its chosen name, Murderbot is nonviolent. In one episode, it refers to one of the scientists as 'a wilderness of organic goo and feelings'—not as an insult but as a way to describe its inability to relate.
The typical story about a machine's quest for humanity tends to involve its search for what the audience understands to be a normal mortal experience: Haley Joel Osment's robot boy David in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, for example, yearns for the love of his adoptive mother. Yet Murderbot posits that a machine capable of having its own wants and beliefs wouldn't necessarily align with the people around it. For the show's robot protagonist, following its own inhuman desires is a much better option.
The show is at its best when examining the pathways an artificially intelligent entity might take if it branched away from what's expected of flesh-and-blood beings: Murderbot is content to beam TV straight into its cortex, or delete important information from its mainframe to make room for episodes of its favorite shows. (Some of these may be relatable experiences, although Murderbot wouldn't see them as such.) In conceiving of a robot that wants something beyond basic personhood, Murderbot rejects the notion that an artificial mind would even wish to see itself as equivalent to humans, and suggests that any notion of an ideal mind—a recognizably organic one—is quite narrow. Whatever consciousness might arise from the digital primordial soup of predictive algorithms, it likely won't resemble living beings as much as we've been made to think it will. But maybe it'll still enjoy our soap operas.