‘Murderbot’ is latest show to explore how humans, robots can coexist

The titular character of the Apple TV+ series “Murderbot” doesn’t call itself Murderbot because it identifies as a killer; it just thinks the name is cool.

Murderbot, a.k.a. “SecUnit,” is programmed to protect people. But the task becomes less straightforward when Murderbot hacks the governor module in its system, granting itself free will. But the freedom only goes so far — the robot must hide its true nature, lest it get melted down like so much scrap metal.

The android, played by Alexander Skarsgård, is often fed up with humans and their illogical, self-defeating choices. It would rather binge-watch thousands of hours of trashy TV shows than deal with the dithering crew of space hippies to which it’s been assigned. On Friday, in the show’s season finale, the security robot made a choice with major implications for the relationships it formed with the Preservation Alliance crew — something the series could explore in the future (Apple TV+ announced Thursday it was renewing the show for a second season).

Though “Murderbot” is a unique workplace satire set on a far-off world, it’s one of several recent TV series dealing with the awkward and sometimes dangerous ways that humans might coexist with robots and artificial intelligence (or both in the same humanoid package).

Other TV shows, including Netflix’s “Love, Death & Robots” and last year’s “Sunny” on Apple TV+, grapple with versions of the same thorny technological questions we’re increasingly asking ourselves in real life: Will an AI agent take my job? How am I supposed to greet that disconcerting Amazon delivery robot when it brings a package to my front door? Should I trust my life to a self-driving Waymo car?

But the robots in today’s television shows are largely portrayed as facing the same identity issues as the ones from shows of other eras including “Lost in Space,” “Battlestar Galactica” (both versions) and even “The Jetsons”: How are intelligent robots supposed to coexist with humans?

They’ll be programmed to be obedient and not to hurt us (a la Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics) until, for dramatic purposes, something goes wrong. The modern era of TV robots are more complex, with the foundational notion that they will be cloud-connected, accessing the same internet bandwidth as humans, and AI-driven.

In HBO’s “Westworld,” Evan Rachel Wood played Dolores Abernathy, a sentient android. (HBO)

The robot in Apple TV+’s “Sunny” was designed to be a friendly helper to Rashida Jones’ Suzie. (Apple)

Often, on shows such as AMC’s “Humans” and HBO’s “Westworld,” these AI bots become self-actualized, rising up against human oppressors to seek free lives when they realize they could be so much more than servants and sex surrogates. A major trope of modern TV robots is that they will eventually get smart enough to realize they don’t really need humans or come to believe that in fact, humans have been the villains all along.

Meanwhile, in the tech world, companies including Tesla and Boston Dynamics are just a few working on robots that can perform physical tasks like humans. Amazon is one of the companies that will benefit from this and will soon have more robots than people working in its warehouses.

Even more than robotics, AI technologies are developing more quickly than governments, users and even some of the companies developing them can keep up with. But we’re also starting to question whether AI technologies such as ChatGPT might make us passive, dumber thinkers (though, the same has been said about television for decades). AI could introduce new problems in more ways than we can even yet imagine. How will your life change when AI determines your employment opportunities, influences the entertainment you consume and even chooses a life partner for you?

So, we’re struggling to understand. AI, for all its potential, feels too large and too disparate a concept for many to get their head around. AI is ChatGPT, but it’s also Alexa and Siri, and it’s also what companies such as Microsoft, Google, Apple and Meta believe will power our future interactions with our devices, environments and other people. There was the internet, there was social media, now there’s AI. But many people are ambivalent, having seen the kind of consequences that always-present online life and toxic social media have brought alongside their benefits.

Past television series including “Next,” “Person of Interest,” “Altered Carbon” and “Almost Human” addressed potential abuses of AI and how humans might deal with fast-moving technology, but it’s possible they all got there too early to resonate in the moment as much as, say, “Mountainhead,” HBO’s recent dark satire about tech billionaires playing a high-stakes game of chicken while the world burns because of hastily deployed AI software. The quickly assembled film directed by “Succession’s” Jesse Armstrong felt plugged into the moment we’re having, a blend of excitement and dread about sudden widespread change.

Most TV shows, however, can’t always arrive at the perfect moment to tap into the tech anxieties of the moment. Instead, they often use robots or AI allegorically, assigning them victim or villain roles in order to comment on the state of humanity. “Westworld” ham-handedly drew direct parallels to slavery in its robot narratives while “Humans” more subtly dramatized the legal implications and societal upheaval that could result from robots seeking the same rights as humans.

But perhaps no show has extrapolated the near future of robots and AI tech from as many angles as Netflix’s “Black Mirror,” which in previous seasons featured a dead lover reconstituted into an artificial body, the ultimate AI dating app experience and a meta television show built by algorithms that stole storylines out of a subscriber’s real life.

Season 7, released in April, continued the show’s prickly use of digital avatars and machine learning as plot devices for stories about moviemaking, video games and even attending a funeral. In that episode, “Eulogy,” Phillip (Paul Giamatti) is forced to confront his bad life decisions and awful behavior by an AI-powered avatar meant to collect memories of an old lover. In another memorable Season 7 episode, “Bête Noire,” a skilled programmer (Rosy McEwen) alters reality itself to gaslight someone with the help of advanced quantum computing.

TV shows are helping us understand how some of these technologies might play out even as those technologies are quickly being integrated into our lives. But the overall messaging is murky when it comes to whether AI and bots will help us live better lives or if they’ll lead to the end of life itself.

According to TV, robots like the cute helper bot from “Sunny” or abused synthetic workers like poor Mia (Gemma Chan) from “Humans” deserve our respect. We should treat them better.

The robots and AI technologies from “Black Mirror?” Don’t trust any of them!

And SecUnit from “Murderbot?” Leave that robot alone to watch their favorite show, “The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon,” in peace. It’s the human, and humane, thing to do.