Emotional engagement a key strength of robot tale
“Humans,” the drama about human-robot relations, drew modest attention during its first season in 2015.
Then, the show was eclipsed by a new model.
When the HBO series “Westworld” — more cinematic and with greater star power — followed last year, “Humans” became the Zune to the “Westworld” iPod.
Although “Humans” lacks its American cousin’s elegant form, it nonetheless has an impressive array of functions.
Both series, like “Battlestar Galactica” before them, belong to an old sci-fi subgenre — the rise of the machines — with an established set of questions.
Where is the line between calculating and thinking?
Should a sentient machine have human rights?
And the big one, a parallel for the dread of any privileged group facing an empowered underclass: What if they do to us what we did to them?
As these shows demonstrate, however, there is more than one way to run this program.
In “Humans,” synths are employed throughout society — as servants, caregivers, tram drivers.
They have cognitive abilities but are designed to have no free will.
At the center of the first season was the Hawkins family, a middle-class British clan who bought a synth, Anita (Gemma Chan), to help around the house.
The children became deeply attached to her, and the marital problems between Joe (Tom Goodman-Hill) and Laura (Katherine Parkinson) grew worse when Laura discovered that Joe had had sex with Anita.
But the biggest complication was that “Anita” turned out to be Mia, a sentient synth who had Anita’s simpler personality written over her like a software patch. Mia was created as a member of a fugitive “family” of self-aware synths, whose ability to think for themselves — and to spread humanlike consciousness to other synths — made them dangerous in the eyes of authorities.
In the second season, which began last Monday on AMC, Joe and Laura are seeing a synth marriage counselor. The series also broadens its scope, introducing Dr. Athena Morrow (Carrie-Anne Moss of “The Matrix”), a U.S. researcher whose work on artificial consciousness could again revolutionize synth technology.
It is moving to hear Niska (Emily Berrington) give the argument for the rights of robot-kind: “If a thing can be free, it should be free. If it can think, it should think. If it can feel, it should feel.”
Its title notwithstanding, “Humans” makes a stronger case for them than for us.
“Humans” is shown at 10 p.m. Mondays on AMC.