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.