Bad robots

You’d think scientists might have realised by now that creating a race of super-robots is about as wise as opening a dinosaur park. Yet in Channel 4’s new sci-fi series Humans (Sunday), the manufacturers of the extremely lifelike cyber-servants known as ‘synths’ were weirdly confident that nothing could go wrong. Nor did it cross their minds that the synths — programmed only to do whatever their owners told them — could possibly develop their own thoughts and emotions…

Still, if its premise is almost heroically unoriginal, Humans does look as if it’ll be giving the social, scientific and philosophical implications of advanced artificial intelligence an impressively thorough airing. And, because it’s cunningly set in the present, what could otherwise have been rather abstract ideas are disconcertingly anchored in a reality we already recognise. The synths themselves, for example, with their scripted courtesies, are not unlike all those overtrained service staff we meet every day — especially when ordering coffee.

The story began when Joe Hawkins (Tom Goodman-Hill) had had enough of looking after the house and children when his lawyer wife Laura (Katherine Parkinson) was away on cases. He therefore popped along to his local branch of Persona Synthetics and bought himself a robot called Anita. Oddly, though, when Laura returned home, she didn’t appear all that grateful to find a machine in the shape of a beautiful younger woman uncomplainingly doing all the domestic chores.

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She would have been even more alarmed if she’d known that Anita is one of a handful of synths (so far) heading towards full consciousness — as spelled out later by a scientist who helpfully took on the same role as Basil Exposition in the Austin Powers movies. Thanks to him, we now understand that synths like Anita are approaching ‘the singularity’: the point at which technology can think for and reproduce itself.