Upcoming Apple TV+ series Murderbot takes place in a future where survey missions on distant planets are required to bring a Security Unit—a hulking robot created using mechanical and organic parts—as protection. Required, that is, by the all-powerful company that controls all the commerce in the galaxy. It’s a scary situation to contemplate, especially the part about being on an isolated planet with a powerful AI that has guns tucked into its arms.
But Murderbot takes a surprising approach to that sci-fi trope. Adapted from the Murderbot Diaries books by Martha Wells, the show makes its potentially terrifying artificial construct the protagonist of the story (played by Alexander Skarsgård), and imagines that even after it hacks itself and gains free will, it would still look out for the puny humans in its midst.
In a recent chat with io9 ahead of Murderbot‘s debut, creators, writers, directors, and executive producers Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz said there’s certainly optimism to be taken away from this story—and quite a bit of humor to go with that.
“To some degree we were looking at this as a post-dystopian world, meaning like, yes, there’s a dystopia, corporations are pretty much running the show,” Paul Weitz said. “But at the same time, we have objective evidence that almost everything is half-assed. Like the moment that somebody achieves totalitarian power, they screw up on some level, and there’s still flowers growing through the cracks and weeds. In this case, there’s Murderbot’s sense of humor. The idea that a sense of humor is evidence of personhood and individuality and is going to exist in various manifestations. It was a core thing, I think.”
When io9 suggested one of the show’s biggest themes revolve around what it means to be human, Chris Weitz modified that slightly. “It’s more like what it is to be a person, because I think we’re about to deal with people who aren’t human as AGI becomes more of a reality,” he said. “And AGI, you know, large language models being fed on data which is produced by humans in the first place, means that it’s going to be related in some way.”
“I think that Martha throughout the [book] series presents different kinds of consciousness and different kinds of being who are still people. There’s a loose analogy, because I don’t want it to be too direct, to people who are on various positions along various spectrums of neuroatypicality and various people can identify with that character to various degrees.”
“I [identify with the character] along the kind of axis of social anxiety, and certainly Martha sort of felt that she was discovering her neuroatypicality while she was writing the character. I think what it has to say is that there are various ways of being a person, and that as Paul really likes to say, people aren’t reducible, not to be seen as a group or just in terms of what their psychological characteristics are, but that the uniqueness of every individual is really important.”
Murderbot‘s first two episodes arrive May 16 on Apple TV+.
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