ABC2’s ‘Humans’ Turns Our Reliance On Technology Into Civil Rights Sci-Fi
What if your phone was self-aware, and hated the things you make it do?
It’s a truism that stories about robots and artificial intelligence are really meditations on the nature of humanity. Given that our current reliance on technology effectively makes us into cyborgs, what really separates people from machines? Is it self-awareness? Empathy? Mastery over technology? Or the urge to dominate and destroy what we fear?
Humans, a new eight-part UK/US drama series from the producers of Broadchurch, explores a parallel present in which android servants known as ‘synths’ are part of everyday life. They’ve taken over low-status jobs including farm labour, aged care, domestic service and sex work – despite a reactionary anti-synth movement called We Are People.
However, some synths have pulled that old AI trick of becoming self-aware. And as a renegade band of conscious synths led by the enigmatic Leo Elster (Colin Morgan) roams the countryside, searching for answers, hunting them is a shadowy government scientist (Danny Webb) determined to prevent the Singularity by any means necessary…
Based on the Swedish drama series Real Humans (currently being repeated on SBS2), Humans elegantly sketches the ways in which the recognisable rhythms of everyday life have seamlessly accommodated the strangeness of artificial people. The way they look, and move, and react is just a little bit ‘off’; yet we can’t help falling into interactions and relationships with them that we still want to believe are uniquely human.
But this isn’t just a series about ‘humans versus robots’, or a cautionary tale about the fatal hubris of ambitious AI development. And it goes further than exploring our emotional attachment to technology, as dramatised in stories like Her. The very word ‘robot’ means ‘slave’, and as cynical teenager Mattie Hawkins (Lucy Carless) reminds her family after they purchase Anita (Gemma Chan) to help with their housework, “That’s exactly what she is.”
By creating a world dependent on synth labour, and casting its synth characters in jobs that are notorious for dehumanising treatment, Humans invites viewers to consider their real-life implication in slavery and exploitation. Societies have already allowed the cruel subjugation of fellow human beings on the grounds of race and ethnicity, gender, religion and class. Is it any more arbitrary to treat some people as less than human because they’re not organic?
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Do You Love Your Devices? Do They Hate You?
Laura Hawkins (Katherine Parkinson) is a frazzled lawyer and mother of three who’s blindsided when her husband Joe (Tom Goodman-Hill) buys Anita to help run their household. While Laura insists Anita is “just a stupid machine” – nothing more than a humanoid household appliance – she’s disquieted by the synth’s moments of oddly emotional behaviour, and especially by her interest in Laura’s youngest daughter, Sophie (Pixie Davis).
The look of vague horror that Parkinson wears throughout is a delicious callback to the technology-blind manager she played in The IT Crowd. Anita makes Laura feel ashamed of her own imperfect mothering; she’s especially crushed when Sophie says she prefers Anita to read to her, because “she doesn’t rush.”
Another skeptic is Detective Sergeant Pete Drummond (Neil Maskell), who investigates synth-related crimes. Drummond’s injured wife (Jill Halfpenny) is being cared for – a little too enthusiastically – by hunky physiotherapist synth Simon (Jack Derges).
“That invasion of his space and the fact that he can’t seem to escape at work or home from synths is a source of great stress to him,” says Maskell of his character. “He really is a pen and paper man and now he’s trying to deal with how technology has overrun the job of policing.”
Conversely, retired robot engineer Dr George Millican (William Hurt) is sentimentally attached to his malfunctioning first-generation carer synth, Odi (Will Tudor). George suffers from memory loss, so Odi’s glitchy recollections are his only reminder of his dead wife, Mary. But after Odi malfunctions disastrously in a supermarket, George’s NHS caseworker forces him to take on Vera (Rebecca Front), a matronly, domineering synth.
At his best, Hurt has always had a reticent, hangdog quality, which he uses beautifully here. Hurt’s casting is as enjoyably intertextual as Parkinson’s, given he played the fatherly roboticist in the film AI. (The Pinocchio trope is huge in robot stories.) Tudor – best known as twinky Olyvar in Game of Thrones – is also charming as the vulnerable Odi.
The show’s most intriguing characters are the conscious synths led by Leo, who sees them as his family. They’re emancipated slaves – and one of the key tensions in Humans is how they’ll use that freedom. Will they avenge themselves on the humans who’ve abused them? Or will they seek to free other synths through an extremely literal brand of consciousness-raising?
The character of Niska (Emily Berrington) adds an agreeable dimension of feminist rage. Imprisoned in a synth brothel whose heat-sensitive doors can only be opened by humans, Niska takes violent action to free herself, and actively appears to loathe humankind. She makes us consider that we don’t neutrally use technology – we exploit it, just as men have broadly treated women as passive vessels for their desires.
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Creating An Uncannily Robot-Dependent World
Robots are intrinsically uncanny, and one of the things I enjoy most about Humans is the way it imagines its synths’ look and feel, and the way that people buy, personalise, repair, upgrade and onsell them, like phones, computers or cars. Users casually switch synths on and off, charge their batteries, install their software and hack their programming.
“We really wanted to avoid clichés of robothood that you’ve seen in other TV and films,” says series co-writer Jon Brackley. “No quizzical head-cocking or anything like that. We described their movement as like a Japanese tea ritual – all grace and economy of movement. No movement is wasted.”
At a day-long ‘synth school’ workshop, the show’s movement director Dan O’Neill helped the actors develop the synths’ impersonal, economical body language so that viewers would instinctively read them as not-quite-human.
Hair and makeup designer Vickie Lang gave the synth characters unnaturally bright-green irises and symmetrical features, neat, glossy hair and shiny, depilated skin. “We’re always going in powdering T-zones on actors to take the shine away,” Lang says. “I deliberately didn’t do that with the synths.”
Costume designer Ian Fulcher similarly imagined very simple, neutral clothing for the synths; they don’t have warm layers, pockets or decorative details. Because synths are beginning to evolve past humans, Fulcher outfitted the human characters in an autumnal colour palette, while “the synths would always be in this fresh, clean, no nonsense palette, almost like it’s a spring, a lightness.”
Much like mobile phones, synths get accessorised according to their ‘primary user’s tastes. George’s synth Odi wears a Christmas jumper hand-knitted by George’s dead wife Mary – “because it’s almost like he has become part of the family,” Fulcher says.
We’re used to thinking of robots in terms of our own emotional attachments to them, or as artificial intelligences that seek to dominate or exterminate the humans they supersede. We obsess over Turing tests, Asimov protocols and other firm rules separating them and us. But Humans shows that these boundaries are permeable.
Humans and synths aren’t just users and tools. They’re coexistent agents who share many qualities, and who have moral responsibilities to one another. What if your phone resented the things you made it do, and rebelled against you? What if your car were also your wife, or your son? A show that explores questions like these is definitely worth watching.
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Humans airs at 8:30pm Mondays on ABC2.
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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She blogs on style, history and culture at Footpath Zeitgeist and tweets at@incrediblemelk.