“The best reason to make machines more like people is to make people less like machines,” declares a scientist in AMC’s intriguing new drama Humans, beginning June 28. Sounds kinda great, doesn’t it — genial, talking and walking Siris to do the housework and other drudgery that keeps us from the stuff we really long to do?
But what if there comes a point where technology can advance and repair itself without our help — a theory dubbed the Singularity by mathematician John von Neumann in 1958? What is the incentive to excel in school or our workplace if machines can be programmed to perform equally well? Why do we become so attached to devices that can’t love us back — and would we love them most if they could be “taught” to return our affections?
Set in a “parallel present” where the latest must-have technology is a robotic helper known as a “Synth,” Humans focuses on three converging storylines: suburban parents at odds over the purpose of their new acquisition; a “family” of synths desperate to hide a frightening secret; and elderly widower Dr. George Millican (William Hurt), who is fighting the replacement of his outdated synth Odi — the beloved repository for years of memories George has lost to a stroke — with a newer, more vigilant model intended to preserve his health.
To quiz Hurt about Humans is to discover he clearly relishes its subject matter, displaying a fierce and thoughtful intellect that makes the ideas even more provocative.
On his initial reaction to the project
For me, the dimension of televised treatments about major modern social issues is that the production usually only addresses the topic from one point of view. … It’s just easier, I guess, for networks to try to go to higher geographical ground from which to survey the field-of-topic battle. Humans is specifically built on the opposite of the high-ground premise. It deals in the trenches — the kitchens and dining rooms and bedrooms of middle-class homes — where it imagines something both simple and crucially complex: the physical relationships between humans and the machines they either make or tacitly allow to be made and to serve them in ways projected by designers to be a good idea but are not quite so practical in the long run. And, then, not at all what anyone had in mind. People are right to be nervous about it. … There is absolutely no dimension of man’s intellectual or material existence that the computer will not affect and then re-affect. It’s a done deal. The question is how we interact with it, how wise we are, how philosophical we are. That’s the real issue, here: philosophy — literally, “love of thought.”
On current healthcare parallels in George’s storyline
I heard the other day that in Japan and America there have been surveys taken that suggest the aging populations in those cultures have fewer reservations about having a synth/bot/whatever (no offense, Odi) take care of them in their old age than most Europeans — and especially Brits. Which makes me want to move to England, personally, because I am not at all sure I want to trade human company for synthetic (again, Odi, be calm). … To put it very simply, if I am going to a hospice, I want a real human hand holding mine. [But] the attention Odi gets from George and the interaction of that maintenance with the memory banks Odi keeps available to George to keep George’s wife poignantly “alive” raises the real question about the sanctity of memory and the identity of emotion.
On Humans’ notion that purpose and place in our family, our workplace, our community is as vital to our personhood as the freedom to do as we please.
This is where Humans finds its heart and soul as an artistic proposition — it’s personal. Life is as essentially personal as communal, as unique as it is ordinary. What’s most important about it is that there is no more accurate way to know the experience of others than by knowing the personal. It’s one of the great ironies that we don’t really feel our kinship and togetherness with others till we know how fundamentally we are alone — and that we don’t know compassion until we can take moralizing judgment out of the equation.
On his own take on modern technology and communication
When I reflect on this subject, I always remember that my father was born by the light of a kerosene lamp, that I was born to the light of an electric bulb controlled by a switch on a wall, and that my children are born with 35,000 bytes per second in a room called a matrix. [Twitter’s] 140 characters — certainly not my own style! — may be haiku territory. Maybe some of the greatest poetry, defined as the fewest words with the most meaning, is yet to come because of the talents being refined by those who practice that craft aIs speak all these way too many words. Short answer: I use technology. I wouldn’t want it to dance alone.