Mental Floss

tieman64

"What a pleasant introduction to AI for anyone who's never thought about AI before, who's unlikely to think about AI again, and who doesn't like thinking very hard about much of anything." - Peter Watts

Clichés abound in "Humans", a consoling science fiction series designed for those with no real interest in the genre. The series begins in the household of Joe Hawkins, a man who buys a "synth" behind the back of his wife. These "synths" - essentially sexy (of course) robot assistants - are treated with increasing suspicion by humans, who eventually exploit them for sex, work and violent amusement. As the series progresses, the usual questions are then asked: are synths dangerous? Will they usurp "real" human beings? Are they "alive"? Will prosthetic sex replace "real sex"? Will synths take jobs? Should they have rights? Is artificial consciousness akin to human consciousness? And so on and so on.

"Humans" was based upon a Swedish television series. Most of its subplots are cribbed from "Blade Runner", "Automata", "I, Robot", "AI: Artificial Intelligence" (it steals whole names, characters, actors and scenes from here), "World on a Wire" and countless other science fiction works. Elsewhere its conclusions or lines of enquiry are either wrong or trite. "Humans", for example, is based on the old fear that "robots" will "become too human". Contemporary neuroscience, however, stresses the opposite; it is man who is a robot who doesn't know it. It is man whose thoughts, traits, actions and desires are always imported from outside the body. It is man whose constituents are wholly dependent upon external programming. It is man who is mechanistically programmed by an unbroken causal chain. Indeed, eliminativist materialists insist that humans are only conscious of their thoughts and actions microseconds after they have already enacted the thought or task; something is making your decisions, and it's not "you". "You" appear after the act, and exist only to fabricate or overlay stories and consolatory fictions about "free will"; post-hoc rationalisations of processes that happen mechanistically through chains of electrochemical cause-and-effect. That "you" don't experience these facts are largely down to the way the brain works. Brain's deceive. If reality were their priority, you wouldn't think you exist.

"Humans", however, is far too timid to turn its human beings into grotesque marionettes. Instead it remains on the level of 1950s science fiction, in which it is the robots who are portrayed as stunted "puppets" on the verge of becoming "more human". That man's as freakish and glass-eyed is a truth too traumatic.

"Humans" has understandably been scoffed at by science fiction writers. "There is nothing artificial about these intelligences," author and scientist Peter Watts writes of the series. "The sapient ones are Just Like Us. They want to live, Just Like We Do. They want to be Free, Just Like Us. They even rage against their sexual enslavement, Just Like We Would. And the non-sapient models? Never fear; by the end of the season, we've learnt that with a bit of viral reprogramming, they too can be Just Like Us! They are so much like us, in fact, that they effectively shut down any truly interesting questions you might want to ask about AI."

Watts is right, but it's these very "familiar" qualities which has made the series popular with critics and audiences. "Humans" humanises machines, is obsessed with machines being "free" and "becoming conscious", for the purpose of inverting truths and evading more traumatic facts: humans are mechanistic, unfree and largely deluded about consciousness. The series doesn't use machines to investigate "what humanity is". It naively projects upon machines what humans wish humans were.

Most of the robots in "Humans" are sex workers. This is intended as a critique of contemporary sexism, dehumanisation and exploitation, but the series itself has no real interest in contemporary class divides and/or exploitation as it applies to humans. The world of "Humans" is mostly one of upper-middle-class luxury and techno-capitalist chic. And that "normal human sex" is itself "robotic" and "mechanistic", whether augmented by technology, digital pornography or when left to old fashioned "real human appendages", is something too disturbing for the series.

Late in the series, "Humans" shows robots being robbed of their "consciouness" (housed in code or chips) so as to make them "better slaves". Again, the series resorts to old fashioned assumptions about "consciousness" and "selfhood". But "selves", as neuroscience shows, are largely a myth; a result of the nervous system accidentally mapping itself within a simulation or world model. The "self" isn't some "magical essence" or "morsel of true being" which "imbues a body with a soul or substance". Rather, the "self" misidentifies itself as being "alive" and emerges from processes which are already running.

The weirdest thing about "Humans", however, is the world in which it takes place. This is a futuristic version of Europe with high tech robots but no smart cars, sex robots but conservative sexual mores. The show's schizophrenia extends to its paranoia about "robots taking jobs" and "demanding rights". But unless they exist in some post-capitalist future, robot workers cannot replace aggregate human labour. Capitalism's contradictions are such that "hiring" robots leads to less human employment which leads to less consumer earnings which leads to less consumption which leads to less corporate profits which leads to less, not more, robots. Sperm is cheap. Automating the planet kills your customer.

4/10 - Glossy but clichéd.

score /10

tieman64 25 February 2016

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3421739/