DIGITAL CONNECTION

Onscreen, robots are the most interesting people

- JAMES PONIEWOZIK

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 generalised AI 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.