Author: admin

The titular character of the Apple TV+ series “Murderbot” doesn’t call itself Murderbot because it identifies as a killer; it just thinks the name is cool.

Murderbot, a.k.a. “SecUnit,” is programmed to protect people. But the task becomes less straightforward when Murderbot hacks the governor module in its system, granting itself free will. But the freedom only goes so far — the robot must hide its true nature, lest it get melted down like so much scrap metal.

The android, played by Alexander Skarsgård, is often fed up with humans and their illogical, self-defeating choices. It would rather binge-watch thousands of hours of trashy TV shows than deal with the dithering crew of space hippies to which it’s been assigned. On Friday, in the show’s season finale, the security robot made a choice with major implications for the relationships it formed with the Preservation Alliance crew — something the series could explore in the future (Apple TV+ announced Thursday it was renewing the show for a second season).

Though “Murderbot” is a unique workplace satire set on a far-off world, it’s one of several recent TV series dealing with the awkward and sometimes dangerous ways that humans might coexist with robots and artificial intelligence (or both in the same humanoid package).

Other TV shows, including Netflix’s “Love, Death & Robots” and last year’s “Sunny” on Apple TV+, grapple with versions of the same thorny technological questions we’re increasingly asking ourselves in real life: Will an AI agent take my job? How am I supposed to greet that disconcerting Amazon delivery robot when it brings a package to my front door? Should I trust my life to a self-driving Waymo car?

But the robots in today’s television shows are largely portrayed as facing the same identity issues as the ones from shows of other eras including “Lost in Space,” “Battlestar Galactica” (both versions) and even “The Jetsons”: How are intelligent robots supposed to coexist with humans?

They’ll be programmed to be obedient and not to hurt us (a la Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics) until, for dramatic purposes, something goes wrong. The modern era of TV robots are more complex, with the foundational notion that they will be cloud-connected, accessing the same internet bandwidth as humans, and AI-driven.

In HBO’s “Westworld,” Evan Rachel Wood played Dolores Abernathy, a sentient android. (HBO)

The robot in Apple TV+’s “Sunny” was designed to be a friendly helper to Rashida Jones’ Suzie. (Apple)

Often, on shows such as AMC’s “Humans” and HBO’s “Westworld,” these AI bots become self-actualized, rising up against human oppressors to seek free lives when they realize they could be so much more than servants and sex surrogates. A major trope of modern TV robots is that they will eventually get smart enough to realize they don’t really need humans or come to believe that in fact, humans have been the villains all along.

Meanwhile, in the tech world, companies including Tesla and Boston Dynamics are just a few working on robots that can perform physical tasks like humans. Amazon is one of the companies that will benefit from this and will soon have more robots than people working in its warehouses.

Even more than robotics, AI technologies are developing more quickly than governments, users and even some of the companies developing them can keep up with. But we’re also starting to question whether AI technologies such as ChatGPT might make us passive, dumber thinkers (though, the same has been said about television for decades). AI could introduce new problems in more ways than we can even yet imagine. How will your life change when AI determines your employment opportunities, influences the entertainment you consume and even chooses a life partner for you?

So, we’re struggling to understand. AI, for all its potential, feels too large and too disparate a concept for many to get their head around. AI is ChatGPT, but it’s also Alexa and Siri, and it’s also what companies such as Microsoft, Google, Apple and Meta believe will power our future interactions with our devices, environments and other people. There was the internet, there was social media, now there’s AI. But many people are ambivalent, having seen the kind of consequences that always-present online life and toxic social media have brought alongside their benefits.

Past television series including “Next,” “Person of Interest,” “Altered Carbon” and “Almost Human” addressed potential abuses of AI and how humans might deal with fast-moving technology, but it’s possible they all got there too early to resonate in the moment as much as, say, “Mountainhead,” HBO’s recent dark satire about tech billionaires playing a high-stakes game of chicken while the world burns because of hastily deployed AI software. The quickly assembled film directed by “Succession’s” Jesse Armstrong felt plugged into the moment we’re having, a blend of excitement and dread about sudden widespread change.

Most TV shows, however, can’t always arrive at the perfect moment to tap into the tech anxieties of the moment. Instead, they often use robots or AI allegorically, assigning them victim or villain roles in order to comment on the state of humanity. “Westworld” ham-handedly drew direct parallels to slavery in its robot narratives while “Humans” more subtly dramatized the legal implications and societal upheaval that could result from robots seeking the same rights as humans.

But perhaps no show has extrapolated the near future of robots and AI tech from as many angles as Netflix’s “Black Mirror,” which in previous seasons featured a dead lover reconstituted into an artificial body, the ultimate AI dating app experience and a meta television show built by algorithms that stole storylines out of a subscriber’s real life.

Season 7, released in April, continued the show’s prickly use of digital avatars and machine learning as plot devices for stories about moviemaking, video games and even attending a funeral. In that episode, “Eulogy,” Phillip (Paul Giamatti) is forced to confront his bad life decisions and awful behavior by an AI-powered avatar meant to collect memories of an old lover. In another memorable Season 7 episode, “Bête Noire,” a skilled programmer (Rosy McEwen) alters reality itself to gaslight someone with the help of advanced quantum computing.

TV shows are helping us understand how some of these technologies might play out even as those technologies are quickly being integrated into our lives. But the overall messaging is murky when it comes to whether AI and bots will help us live better lives or if they’ll lead to the end of life itself.

According to TV, robots like the cute helper bot from “Sunny” or abused synthetic workers like poor Mia (Gemma Chan) from “Humans” deserve our respect. We should treat them better.

The robots and AI technologies from “Black Mirror?” Don’t trust any of them!

And SecUnit from “Murderbot?” Leave that robot alone to watch their favorite show, “The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon,” in peace. It’s the human, and humane, thing to do.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Stockholm, spring, late 1960s, and the city is glistening with potential: freshly laid concrete and laminated protest placards and the glass blocks of Sergels Torg and Kulturhuset rising against the sky. This is the backdrop for Gun-Britt Sundström’s 1976 novel Engagement, an instant classic upon its publication in the author’s native Sweden that has now been published for the first time in English.

Our protagonist, Martina, is a woman of this new age, energised by philosophy lectures and political discussions at cafés and screenings of Viridiana. She doesn’t want marriage or children or a traditional life, but her boyfriend, fellow scholar Gustav, is certain that he does.

The epigraph of the novel is taken from Kierkegaard, who is often referenced within: “Marry and you will regret it; do not marry and you will regret that too”. It’s hardly a surprising choice for a book whose original title, Maken, translates to “The Husband”, and whose plot is largely an examination of its central couple’s deliberation over whether or not to marry. For Martina, the happiness of coupledom is a form of somnambulance, the flicker of an eyelid that turns seconds into years, decades: “You get an apartment. You get a fiancé. You get a job. And then you’re stuck,” she thinks.

This anxiety lies at the heart of Engagement, a micro examination of a macro concern. The young people in the book are markedly different from the generation preceding them; du-reformen (a process of linguistic informalisation that saw, for example, the use of the starchy hierarchical pronoun “ni” abandoned in favour of the egalitarian “du”) is widely accepted, the oral contraceptive pill is freely available, and student-led political action — feminist, Marxist, anti-colonialist — is common. But the old structures still scaffold society. While Martina is able to get the pill, she has to pre-empt the doctor’s probing questions and pretend she has a fiancé, lest she be treated like her friend Harriet and be “considered too young although she was nineteen already”.

It may be tempting to see the book as a relic, a document of a half-century past. There has been somewhat of a gold-rush around “neglected” European novels recently, with the popularity of translated fiction resulting into a number of 20th-century authors being translated into English for the first time. But Engagement still feels effortlessly contemporary, even refreshing. This is both testament to Sundström’s light-touch, confessional style — captured in Kathy Saranpa’s translation — and a sad indictment that progress, particularly for women, has not truly materialised — and may even have backslid.

Although the refrain of “the personal is political” now has a plasticky, cliched ring to it, Sundström’s novel is a much-needed reminder of just how radical the concept was, and perhaps even how it can continue to be. The way Martina relates her feminist precepts to her own life still resonates (and perhaps always will), a determination not so much to “have it all” but to redefine what “all” means. As much as she loves Gustav, she is unwilling to reconcile herself to the identity of wife or mother, to resign herself to jam-making and full skirts and baby vomit. In this light, then, “all” is freedom: to have “a little while” to oneself, as Martina sees it.

Yet aside from writerly skill and timely resonance, part of why Engagement feels so immediate is that its strident politics are married to an eternal, universal central conceit: people not being able to love another as they want to be loved. “An idiot can see that Gustav is the right one,” Martina despairs. “But I’m the one who’s wrong!” For her, love is potential — for oneself, for society — a constant desire for more.

But what if that, too, can never be enough? The traditional narrative of domesticity, after all, provides a neat structure; beginning, subheadings, end. Its alternative is free verse.

Part of the book’s power comes from Sundström’s refusal to shy away from pangs of regret or loneliness — she is aware that there is always a pay-off, always a bargain struck: “I certainly don’t envy my colleagues their marriages,” Martina says at one point. “But I do envy them their summer cottages.”

Perhaps, then, another quote from Kierkegaard would have suited the epigraph: “Were I to wish for anything I would not wish for wealth and power, but for the passion of the possible, that eye which everywhere, ever young, ever burning, sees possibility. Pleasure disappoints, not possibility.”

Engagement by Gun-Britt Sundström, translated by Kathy Saranpa Penguin Modern Classics £18.99, 512 pages

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X

“A Beautiful Noise” is a jukebox musical that understands the assignment.

The show, which opened Wednesday at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre on the Broadway musical’s North American tour, exists to celebrate the rough magic of Neil Diamond’s catalog. If glorious singing of American pop gold is what you’re looking for, “A Beautiful Noise” delivers.

Diamond’s fans will no doubt feel remunerated by the thrilling vocal performance of Nick Fradiani, the 2015 winner of “American Idol,” who plays the young iteration of the double-cast Neil, the Brooklyn-born pop sensation who went on a rocket ship to fame and fortune that gave him everything in the world but the peace that had always eluded him. Fradiani vocally captures not just the driving excitement of Diamond’s singing but the note of masculine melancholy that gives the songs their grainy, ruminative subtext.

Jukebox musicals, inspired perhaps by the commercial success of “Mamma Mia!,” tend to muscle an artist’s hits into flagrantly incongruous dramatic contexts. Anthony McCarten, the book writer of “A Beautiful Noise,” avoids this trap by setting up a framework that deepens our appreciation of Diamond’s music by shining a biographical light on how the songs came into existence.

The older version of , now the grizzled Diamond burnt out by tour life and desperate not to duplicate the mistakes he made in his first two marriages, is played by Robert Westenberg. He’s been sent by his third wife to a psychotherapist to work on himself. As he shares with the doctor (Lisa Reneé Pitts), he’s been told that he’s hard to live with — an accusation that his long, stubborn silences in the session make instantly credible.

Introspection is as unnatural to Neil as it was for Tony Soprano, but the doctor gently guides Neil past his resistance. Intrigued by his remark that he put everything he had to say into his music, she presents him with a volume of his collected lyrics and asks him to talk her through one of his songs.

Nick Fradiani, from left, Robert Westenberg and Lisa Reneé Pitts as both iterations of Neil and his doctor during an onstage therapy session.

(Jeremy Daniel)

“I Am … I Said,” which makes reference to a frog that dreamed of being a king before becoming one, cuts too close to the bone. That single will have to wait for a breakthrough in therapy, but he is lured back into his past when the Jewish boy from Flatbush talked his way into a meeting with Ellie Greenwich (Kate A. Mulligan), the famed songwriter and producer, who convinced him not to change his name and gave him the chance that set him down the road to stardom.

The production, directed by Michael Mayer and choreographed by Steven Hoggett, marks this therapy milestone by having backup singers and chorus members emerge from behind Neil’s chair. Out of darkness, musical euphoria shines through.

The show’s approach is largely chronological. “I’m A Believer,” which became a runaway hit for the Monkees, catapults Diamond into the big leagues. Once he starts singing his own material, he becomes a bona fide rock star — a moody Elvis who straddles rock, country, folk and pop with a hangdog bravura.

Neil’s first marriage to Jaye Posner (a touching Tiffany Tatreau) is an early casualty after he falls in love with Marcia Murphey (Hannah Jewel Kohn, spinning a seductive spell musically and dramatically). It’s Marcia who coaches him into playing the part of front man. The hits come fast and furious after that, but the frenzy of tour life exacts a severe toll.

Tiffany Tatreau as Diamond’s first wife Jaye Posner, from center left, Nick Fradiani and Kate A. Mulligan as singer-producer Ellie Greenwich in “A Beautiful Noise.”

(Jeremy Daniel)

Of course, everyone at the Pantages is waiting impatiently for “Sweet Caroline,” the anthem that never fails to transform into a sing-along after the first “bum-bum-bum.” The performance of this ecstatic number is powerfully mood-elevating.

Fradiani’s character work is most impressive in his singing. That’s when the inner trouble Neil has been evading since his Brooklyn childhood hauntingly resounds.

“America,” “A Beautiful Noise,” “Song Sung Blue,” “Love on the Rocks” and “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” songs heard countless times, take on more weight as the circumstances of their creation are revealed. The therapy gets a little heavy-handed in the protracted final stretch. But Westenberg, who’s a touch too emphatic early on, lends poignancy to the cathartic release that ushers Neil into a new place of self-understanding.

By keeping the focus where it should be — on the music — “A Beautiful Noise” thrives where more ambitious jukebox musicals stumble. This is a show for fans. But as the son of one who remembers the songs from family road trips, even though I have none of them in my music library, I was grooving to the sound of a bygone America, high on its own unlimited possibilities.

At the curtain call at Wednesday’s opening, Katie Diamond came on stage and video-called her husband as the Pantages audience collectively joined in an encore of “Sweet Caroline.” It wasn’t easy to hear Diamond sing, but it hardly mattered. Fradiani had supplied that dopamine rush for more than two hours with his virtuoso musical portrayal.