The Robots Are The Humans Are The Robots

What Are the Robot Shows Telling Us About Ourselves?

I’m not one of those people who’s a pop culture omnivore. I could make a lot of excuses, but mostly I try to be careful about bandwidth burn rate and I’m tired like all the time.  (Why yes, I do suffer from chronic insomnia.) Name a water-cooler show that’s captured the zeitgeist and there’s a good chance I haven’t watched it yet.

And yet, somehow, I find myself watching Sunny and Pluto at the same time. The former is an off-kilter dark comedy on Apple TV* about a woman in mourning. The latter, airing on Netflix, starts out as a pulp murder-mystery anime with strong existential and geopolitical themes. Both revolve around people who create, live, work with robots, as well the robots’ own evolving ideas about humanity.

In Sunny, Rashida Jones stars as Suzie Sakamoto, an American expat grieving her husband and son after a plane crash. When Suzie receives Sunny—the last automaton designed by her quirky roboticist husband Masahiko—she questions everything about their life together and her family’s supposed deaths. At first, Sunny tries to be an excessively pleasant appliance in Suzie’s life. Suzie comes off as abrasive, avoidant, and obsessive so the dynamic between her and Sunny is a prickly one. Filled with flashbacks, hidden motivations and personal secret shames, Sunny becomes more trippy and untethered to reality with each episode.

The main character on Pluto is Gesicht, an almost-human Europol detective trying find out who’s murdering other advanced robots. He’s also looking into another chain of serial killings where the victims are the scientists who investigated robots being used as WMDs in Persia. Those plotlines intertwine with other threads, like the suspicious gaps in Gesicht’s memory and robots’ efforts to emulate human behavior and fit into society.

For as long as robots have been part of science fiction, they’ve been used as devices that reflect humanity back at itself. Most fictional robots that capture audiences’ hearts or minds do so because they remind viewers of all the different ways to be human. The Robot from Lost in Space was anxious, heedless, and obtuse all at once—“that does not compute!”— which made it a great foil for the simpering, conniving Dr. Smith and restless boy astronaut Will Robinson. The Robot kinda felt like an even more clueless, annoying parent-figure, with none of the familial connection. Or take the titular character in The Iron Giant. His discovery by a 9-year-old boy named Hogarth marks the start of him learning how to play and bond with others, despite the fact of his massive destructive potential. The plot beats leading to the movie’s climax build to an existential final exam: the Giant flies into a frightening rage when it thinks Hogarth is dead and then redeems itself with a selfless sacrifice during the film’s climax.

Isaac Asimov’s famous laws of robotics are also meditations on the gap between how humans should treat each other and how they actually do. Those fictional rules serve as a warning, too. It’d be terrible if we created beings on the cusp of sentience only to have them be just as fallible as us. Yet, the ability to fail is part of the learning process, part of how we take stock of our selves and capabilities. Without failure as a tool, how much can robots, real or fictional, ever approximate the range of human behaviors?

That question electrifies the proceedings of both Sunny and Pluto. In Sunny, the robot-of-the-hour’s programmatic pleasantness seems to be indefatigable at first. But, as the series continues, she starts becoming secretive, jealous, and unpredictable, just like the people surrounding her. Similarly, the dark secrets in Pluto mostly revolve around the artificial beings’ struggle with life’s darker emotions, like hatred or a desire for revenge. Both the main-character robots in these shows make what could be called mistakes, in high-stakes situations. Both face the same embodiment-vs.-functionality paradox: they’re created as beings with great capacity for empathy, but the nature of their creation creates expectations that they’ll never make the same mistakes as people do. However, if mistakes or darker emotions aren’t allowed, can they become fully actualized?

Sunny and Pluto both emerged as the ascendance of generative AI caused a server-side shift for human anxieties about technological ethics. When they’re physical objects, you can turn off a robot, put it into sleep mode, or simply not choose to invite one into your home. As various LLM and gen-AI tools proliferate, it feels harder and harder to create impenetrable boundaries that they can’t cross. The next time I upgrade my smartphone, it’s definitely going to be larded up with some AI crap that I won’t want. I loved this paragraph from Sarah Jeong’s assessment of the coming disinformation superstorm on The Verge:

The persistent cry of “Fake News!” from Trumpist quarters presaged the beginning of this era of unmitigated bullshit, in which the impact of the truth will be deadened by the firehose of lies. The next Abu Ghraib will be buried under a sea of AI-generated war crime snuff. The next George Floyd will go unnoticed and unvindicated.

The conveniences of never-ending technological iteration provide less and less anodyne comfort. We once could tell ourselves that social media platforms allow information to cross borders freely. But now we know that disinformation moves even faster because there are financial and political motivations for platform operators. The innovations that were supposed to make our lives easier have instead made them more complicated in ways that, for many, were hard to anticipate.

GenAI implementations like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini are conspicuously absent from the storylines in Pluto and Sunny. Robots of differing sophistication abound in each series but, of the technologies shown, very few threaten to offload creativity or siphon ingenuity away from humans. There are major plot beats concerned with sophisticated coding and engineering problems in both shows. But at no point do any of the human characters delegate the solutions to a genAI-like application. Those human characters get yelled at by other humans, they sweat through the problem-solving, and they chase their solutions to the point of obsession. Genius, purpose, connection, and meaning are all found in the struggle. The struggle to be more than what we think we are, to defy the world’s expectations, to understand each other. The robots want those things because people want them. Nothing is more human than that struggle. Robots can help us get there but—as both shows posit—whatever humans make will still harbor all our imperfections. It's probably not a good idea to have machines do all the work for us.

*One thing that struck me as worth noting tangentially: the industrial design of the technology on Sunny—a show airing on the televisual organ of one of the world’s biggest consumer tech companies—looks nothing like Apple’s products. I’ve noticed the same thing about Severance, which is another show on Apple TV+. It’s almost like the production designers are explicitly tethering the moral ambiguity of the shows’ consumer tech products to an industrial design language of the bygone past or alternate universes. The product placement, like genAI, is conspicuous in its absence.