In 2022, Blake Lemoine, a software engineer at Google, was working on LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), an AI chatbot, and published logs which he claimed proved that the software application was a sentient being. “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,” the AI said.
If that is true, Lemoine asked, is it ethical for us to create these creatures and use them for our purposes? The AI had even asked Lemoine to hire it a lawyer for protection.
Lemoine was widely ridiculed and ultimately fired from his job. But now, three years later, the technology that alarmed Lemoine has been sold as the next big thing in tech, and the uncomfortable questions he raised remain open. As reports roll in about people who are driven to delusions by getting too involved with a chatbot, it’s easy to think Lemoine might have been an early victim. But on the other hand, we don’t really understand much about how human consciousness arose, or what it even is. When faced with the question of how we could recognize true artificial intelligence, pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing proposed the Turing Test: When you can talk to a computer and are not be able to tell if it’s a computer or a human, we’ve got true artificial intelligence. Ask ChatGPT if we’re already there.
Even if you’re rightly skeptical of the current state of research into general AI, you can see why Google would not want to ask these questions. If their product is sentient, is exploiting it akin to slavery? That’s the jumping off point for Martha Wells’ Murderbot stories. Wells’ hero is a SecUnit, a cyborg construct made of both lab-grown flesh and advanced alloys bristling with armaments. He is owned by a space colonization services corporation that specializes in helping human groups find and exist on new planets.
It’s the future, by the way.
This particular SecUnit is a refurb. An older model, it had its memory erased and a full overhaul after something went wrong on a previous mission. That “something” left 57 members of a mining expedition dead. But the memory wipe process went wrong, and SecUnit was able to hack and disable its governor module, which ensured compliance with its human masters. Haunted by memories of the miner massacre but unsure if it was responsible, the SecUnit names itself Murderbot.
At this point in the sci-fi story, the AI that named itself Murderbot could be expected to start murdering. We’ve all seen The Terminator, and if you haven’t, what are you waiting for? But not this Murderbot. “All I want to do is be left alone to watch my shows,” it says.
Murderbot has a bad streaming habit, and its favorite show is a cheesy space soap opera called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Without a governor module, it’s free to download and watch all the shows it wants, provided it shows up for work as a security guard and doesn’t call attention to itself.
The Murderbot Diaries series, beginning with 2017’s All Systems Red, made such a splash in the sci-fi literary community that Wells started declining Nebula and Hugo Award nominations in order to give someone else a chance to win. Apple TV picked up the rights to the stories, and brothers Paul and Chris Weitz were tapped to run the show. Alexander Skarsgård, who shone as the berserker version of Hamlet in The Northman, was tapped for the lead. The first season, which adapts All Systems Red, will drop its season finale on Friday, July 11th.
Much of the charm of Murderbot is its witheringly sarcastic narration. As a refurb, Murderbot is cheap, so it gets assigned to protect a scouting mission from the PreservationAux, a utopian planet which runs on strict socialist principles of equality and justice. Dr. Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), a terraforming specialist and planetary admin who leads the small expedition, doesn’t even want an armed cyborg in her hab dome, but the insurance company insists.
Murderbot thinks this is a milk run and internally regards the space hippies with withering disdain. Then, while out on a routine mission to collect some geo samples, Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski) and Arada (Tattiawna Jones) are attacked by a giant centipede monster. Murderbot just barely rescues the clients but is heavily damaged in the process. When the expedition tries to contact another base on the other side of the planet, there is no response. The expedition’s cybernetic augmented human Gurathin (David Dastmalchian) begins to notice that SecUnit is acting suspiciously, and suspects it is part of an effort by the corporation to monopolize the team’s discoveries. But Murderbot’s not a party to conspiracy; it just wants to watch its shows.
Which is not to say that there’s not a conspiracy. When the rescue team arrives at the other base, they find the inhabitants dead, and two newer model SecUnits attack Murderbot with the intent of hijacking its governor module. But the joke’s on them, as Murderbot says, “You get what you pay for.”
The transition from page to screen is always tricky, especially with a text as dependent on the writer’s voice as Murderbot’s world-weary narration. The Weitz brothers unpack Wells’ compact structure, taking time in the early episodes to flesh out the galaxy where corporate dystopias live side by side with utopian dreamers. Skarsgård is the glue that holds the show together with a carefully nuanced performance. The misanthropic cyborg learns the art of small talk trying to distract some murderous space pirates, and warily observes, “I’ve been infected with an empathy bug by my clients.” Dumezweni proves that any time a low-budget sci-fi show needs some gravitas, the best way is to hire an acclaimed British stage actor. John Cho kills as the scenery-chewing captain of the ship on Sanctuary Moon, and bringing the show-within-a-show to life is the best addition the TV show brings to the story. As someone with a deep love of, shall we say, “responsibly budgeted” sci-fi TV, Murderbot activates my pleasure centers.
The season finale of Murderbot drops Friday, July 11th, on Apple TV.
