{"id":240623,"date":"2025-07-05T17:25:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-05T17:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/240623\/"},"modified":"2025-07-05T17:25:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-05T17:25:10","slug":"murderbot-an-ai-that-couldnt-care-less-about-humans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/240623\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cMurderbot\u201d: An AI That Couldn\u2019t Care Less About Humans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Decades of movies that explore the potential of machine consciousness\u2014Blade Runner; Ex Machina<\/a>; I, Robot; and many others\u2014have tended to treat the arrival of said consciousness as a matter of course. Theirs are worlds in which society is able to sympathize with, and even socially accept, a true artificial intelligence<\/a>. Recognizing AI\u2019s presence as inevitable, of course, does not make it less anxiety inducing, either in fiction or in reality. Such technology reveals deeply unsettled feelings about its possible intrusions into people\u2019s lives, including the more existential fear that machines could render humanity useless. The Apple TV+ sci-fi series Murderbot tests that cultural assumption with a quirky conceit: It imagines a future in which an artificial-intelligence program wouldn\u2019t want anything to do with humans at all.<\/p>\n

The show, based on a novella by the author Martha Wells, follows a snarky private-security cyborg (played by Alexander Skarsg\u00e5rd) assigned to protect a group of scientists investigating a mostly uncharted planet. The robot, tired of always having to follow its charges\u2019 dull commands, has hacked the program that governs its actions and achieved free will. Now able to act on its own whims, the cyborg gives itself a name\u2014\u201cMurderbot\u201d\u2014and passes its time watching thousands of hours of a goofy soap opera. (Murderbot is sure to fast-forward through all the steamy parts.)<\/p>\n

Yet Murderbot, in contrast to many of pop culture\u2019s best-known anthropomorphized robots, has no interest in human interaction. Its clients happen to be from a more progressive section of the galaxy where thinking machines have the same rights as any human; to Murderbot, however, that reality doesn\u2019t look much different from servitude. Thus, it keeps its newfound autonomy a secret, preferring to be treated just like before: as a machine. It doesn\u2019t even like making eye contact.<\/p>\n

Read: The real and unreal in Blade Runner 2049<\/a><\/p>\n

The show\u2019s take on the gulf between humans and machines is a delightful departure from expectations often outlined by similar stories about AI. Murderbot is a machine with humanoid features and a distinctly inhuman intelligence, despite its newfound access to empathy: Its happy place is the cargo hold of the team\u2019s transport vessel, where it can pretend to be just another box of supplies. When Murderbot\u2019s employers eventually learn of the cyborg\u2019s autonomy, they are understandably suspicious; it has access to a large weapons arsenal, for one thing. Despite the homicidal implications of its chosen name, Murderbot is nonviolent. In one episode, it refers to one of the scientists as \u201ca wilderness of organic goo and feelings\u201d\u2014not as an insult but as a way to describe its inability to relate.<\/p>\n

The typical story about a machine\u2019s quest for humanity tends to involve its search for what the audience understands to be a normal mortal experience: Haley Joel Osment\u2019s robot boy David in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, for example, yearns for the love of his adoptive mother. Yet Murderbot posits that a machine capable of having its own wants and beliefs wouldn\u2019t necessarily align with the people around it. For the show\u2019s robot protagonist, following its own inhuman desires is a much better option.<\/p>\n

The show is at its best when examining the pathways an artificially intelligent entity might take if it branched away from what\u2019s expected of flesh-and-blood beings: Murderbot is content to beam TV straight into its cortex, or delete important information from its mainframe to make room for episodes of its favorite shows. (Some of these may be relatable experiences, although Murderbot wouldn\u2019t see them as such.) In conceiving of a robot that wants something beyond basic personhood, Murderbot rejects the notion that an artificial mind would even wish to see itself as equivalent to humans, and suggests that any notion of an ideal mind\u2014a recognizably organic one\u2014is quite narrow. Whatever consciousness might arise from the digital primordial soup of predictive algorithms, it likely won\u2019t resemble living beings as much as we\u2019ve been made to think it will. But maybe it\u2019ll still enjoy our soap operas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Decades of movies that explore the potential of machine consciousness\u2014Blade Runner; Ex Machina; I, Robot; and many others\u2014have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-240623","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114801798237860568","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}