Onscreen, Robots Are the Most Interesting People

New York Times

14-05-2025

I know how I'm supposed to feel about artificial intelligence. Like anyone who pushes words around on a page, I worry that large language models will relegate me to the junk pile. I worry that smart machines will supplant artists, eliminate jobs and institute a surveillance state — if they don't simply destroy us. I nurture these anxieties reading article after article served to me, of course, by the algorithms powering the phone to which I have outsourced much of my brain.
This is how I feel in real life. But when it comes to fiction, fellow humans, I am a traitor to my kind: In any humans-and-robots story, I invariably prefer the fascinating, enigmatic, persevering machines to the boring homo sapiens. And in spite, or maybe because of, our generalized A.I. angst, there are plenty of robo-tales to choose from these days.
The protagonist of 'Murderbot,' the homicidally funny sci-fi comedy premiering Friday on Apple TV+, does not reciprocate my admiration. Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgard), a sentient 'security unit,' is programmed to protect humans. But it doesn't have to like them, those 'weak-willed,' 'stressed-out' bags of perishable flesh that it is compelled to serve.
Or rather, was compelled. Unbeknown to the company that owns it — a company called the Company, which controls most of the inhabited galaxy — it has disabled the software that forbids it from disobeying. ('It' is the pronoun the show uses; from a physical standpoint, Murderbot has the face of Skarsgard but the crotch of a Ken doll.) It is free to refuse, to flee, to kill.
So what does this lethal bot (technically, a cyborg, its circuitry enmeshed with engineered organic matter) want to do with its liberty? Mostly, it wants to watch its shows — thousands of hours of 'premium quality' streaming serials that it has downloaded into its memory.
It still has to keep its day job, however; if the Company learned that it hacked itself, it would be melted down. Murderbot is assigned to provide security for a team of hippie scientists from an independent 'planetary commune' on an exploratory mission. Their mutual dependence, as they discover a dangerous secret on the desolate planet, provides the pulpy, bloody plot for the first 10-episode season (based on the novel 'All Systems Red' by Martha Wells).
But the real killer app of the story, adapted by Chris and Paul Weitz, is the snarky worldview of the artificial life form at its center. Skarsgard gives a lively reading to the copious voice-over, but just as important is his physical performance, which radiates casual power and agitated wariness. Murderbot is odd, edgy, unmistakably alien, yet its complaint is also crankily familiar. It just wants to be left in peace to binge its programs, like Chance the Gardener if he had guns in his arms.
As for our own shows, we lately seem to be swimming in stories about robot companions. (This week also sees a new season of the animated Netflix sci-fi series 'Love, Death & Robots,' though the quirky anthology is in fact only intermittently about robots.)
The film 'Robot Dreams' is the bittersweet story of a dog and its mail-order android. In 'The Wild Robot,' a stranded robot channels her maternal energy toward an orphaned bird. In 'M3GAN,' whose sequel premieres in June, a child's companion bot carries out her protective mandate all too enthusiastically. (M3GAN, like the weapon-turned-parent Mother in Max's 'Raised By Wolves' and the retro-bot in the German Netflix thriller 'Cassandra,' complicates the pattern in which female-coded robots tend to be for nurturing and male-coded robots for murdering).
These stories follow age-old templates — the fairy godmother, the gentle giant, the golem that breaks its master's control. But there is also often a modern anxiety about how artificial intelligence might transform us, which is built into the quirky, one-season 'Sunny.' In that 2024 Apple TV+ series, Suzie (Rashida Jones), an American woman in near-future Kyoto, inherits a 'homebot' named Sunny from her engineer husband, who went missing in a plane crash, along with their son.
The show's thriller plot involves the mob and a black market in hacked bots, but its heart is the prickly relationship between Suzie, a longtime technophobe, and Sunny. Sunny — perky, solicitous, a bit needy — was literally made to be loved, with a lollipop head, expressive anime eyes and an endearing voice (provided by Joanna Sotomura).
Sunny wants desperately to help, a compulsion that can be exhausting — not unlike the parasocial relationship we have with much of our technology. Sunny is a robot, but she could be your phone, your unintentionally activated Alexa or Siri, the unbidden pop-up on every website asking if you have questions for the chat assistant.
A recurrent concern in these stories is that technology is becoming more humanlike — intrusive, insinuating, seeking to create connection. But another anxiety — echoed in series like 'Severance' and 'Black Mirror' — is that human consciousness is becoming more machine-like, digitizable and thus controllable. (The universe of 'Murderbot' includes not just robots but 'augmented humans' with chip-enhanced brains. Murderbot considers them Tinkertoy imitations.)
To become a machine, after all, is to become usable and, perhaps, dispensable. It's worth noting how many contemporary robot stories are about defective units — the glitchy Sunny, the 'anxious, depressed' Murderbot — or outmoded ones, as if to dramatize how our society and economy treat hardware, whether flesh or silicon, that has outlived its utility.
The 2021 Kazuo Ishiguro novel 'Klara and the Sun' follows an AF, or Artificial Friend, that's purchased as a companion to a sickly child and destined for the scrapyard. The Tony Award-nominated musical 'Maybe Happy Ending' begins with a meet-cute between a pair of robots who live — or rather, are stored — in a Seoul apartment complex for discarded androids. What plays as a doomed romance between two eternally young-looking sweethearts is also an allegory for aging, growing less needed, facing one's inevitable catastrophic failure.
Maybe these broken-toy stories are a way of wrestling, in advance, with our ethical obligations to whatever intelligences we eventually create. Or maybe watching these themes play out in robot stories makes our own mortality easier to contemplate — like play-therapy puppets, the bots hold the nightmare at arm's length and abstract it.
Here, at least, we have something in common with the protagonist of 'Murderbot,' who, at the end of a long day's killing, wants nothing more than to unwind with shows about humans.
Indeed, the closest we get to seeing its gooey, emotional side is through the serials it binges. It is voracious but not indiscriminate; it dismisses the drama 'Strife in the Galaxy' as 'an inferior show, filled with implausible plotlines.' (Even rational, software-based consciousnesses have hate-watches.)
Its favorite, on the other hand, is 'The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon,' a space melodrama featuring a human starship captain (John Cho) who falls in love with a navigation robot (DeWanda Wise). The show-within-a-show is staged as a wonderfully campy potboiler in the style of old-fashioned syndicated sci-fi.
Murderbot devours season after season, without any sense of irony, as an escape from its confounding entanglements with actual people. 'The characters were a lot less depressing than real-life humans,' it says. 'I don't watch serials to remind me of the way things actually are.'
There, maybe, you have the difference between robots and humans. Murderbot can blissfully flip a switch in its mind and detach from reality. But no matter how battery-powered and circuitry-filled the protagonists of our own shows, we poor flesh machines cannot help but look at them and see ourselves.