Black Mirror (TV Program)

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    ‘Murderbot’ Is a Robot Show for an Age of A.I. Angst

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    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 generalized A.I. 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.Alexander Skarsgard stars as Murderbot, an irritable security cyborg charged with protecting space hippies. Apple TV+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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Black Mirror’ Showed Us a Future. Some of It Is Here Now.

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      The long-running tech drama always felt as if it took place in a dystopian near future. How much of that future has come to pass?Since “Black Mirror” debuted in 2011, the dystopian sci-fi anthology series has taken seeds of nascent technology and expanded them to absurd and disturbing proportions.In doing so, it has become a commentary on defining issues of the 21st-century: surveillance, consumerism, artificial intelligence, social media, data privacy, virtual reality and more. Every episode serves in part as a warning about how technological advancement run rampant will lead us, often willingly, toward a lonely, disorienting and dangerous future.Season 7, newly available on Netflix (the streamer acquired the show from Britain’s Channel 4 after its first two seasons), explores ideas around memory alteration, the fickleness of subscription services and, per usual, the validity of A.I. consciousness.Here’s a look back at a few themes from past episodes that seemed futuristic at the time but are now upon us, in some form or another. Down the rabbit hole we go:‘Be Right Back’Season 2, Episode 1Not long after “Be Right Back” came out, services that digitally resurrect people via recordings and social feeds began to be introduced.NetflixA.I. imitations, companion chatbots and humanoid robotsWhen Martha’s partner, Ash, dies in a car accident, she’s plunged into grief. At his funeral, she hears about an online service that can help soften the blow by essentially creating an A.I. imitation of him built from his social media posts, online communications, videos and voice messages.At first she’s skeptical, but when she finds out she’s pregnant, she goes through with it. She enjoys the companionship she finds by talking with “him” on the phone and starts neglecting her real-life relationships. She soon decides to take the next step: having a physical android of Ash created in his likeness. But as she gets to know “him,” a sense of uncanny valley quickly sets in.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New Season of ‘Black Mirror’ on Netflix Satirizes Streaming Services

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      The new season, premiering Thursday on Netflix, includes the show’s most blatant satire of streaming services yet.The deal is too good to be true: The setup is free, the monthly fee low. Streaming is unlimited with further benefits still to come. But hidden costs emerge. Intrusive ads pop up. The app’s time in sleep mode becomes longer and longer. Those perks? You’ll have to pay more for them — much, much more.This story arc should be familiar to anyone who has ever downloaded a free app or subscribed to a streaming service, which at this point is pretty much all of us. And it is at the very dark heart of “Common People,” the first episode of Season 7 of “Black Mirror,” the anthology sci-fi series that helped to give Netflix, which has distributed it since its 2011 debut, artistic cred. All of this season’s six episodes arrive on Thursday.Is mocking streaming services biting the hand that keeps renewing you? Charlie Brooker, the creator of “Black Mirror,” was more equivocal. “To be honest, I’m probably more nibbling the hand that feeds us,” he said on a recent video call.In its past seasons, “Black Mirror” has promoted a skeptical view, perhaps an utterly nihilistic one, regarding the ways in which entertainment is created and enjoyed. In the near future, we are all amusing ourselves to death, or worse. But with the exception of last season’s episode “Joan Is Awful,” written by Brooker and directed by Ally Pankiw, in which a Netflix stand-in creates humiliating shows adapted from its subscribers’ lives, Brooker has never come for streamers so baldly.Brooker first conceived of “Common People” while listening to true-crime podcasts. He was struck by the disjunction of hearing a host describe a mutilated corpse in one moment and advertise a meal prep service the next. What, he wondered, would make a human integrate sponsorship into their ordinary speech?At that point, he thought that the show would be, like “Joan Is Awful,” a dark comedy, a funny story. “He kind of tricked me,” Pankiw, who also directed “Common People,” said of Brooker’s pitch. “I was like, OK great. Then I read the script and I was like, Oh, it’s actually incredibly devastating.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More