Years ago, Hollywood’s best attempt to extinguish humanity involved an Austrian bodybuilder who had the misfortune of being sent back through time naked, and worse still, to the 80s. Somehow the nude meat calculator ended up in biker gear every time, a massive truck would flip over, and there’d be a final showdown in some sort of industrial facility – because Terminators never get into fights of narrative significance in forests, meadows or public libraries.
As a threat to humanity, the Terminator now seems a frightfully outdated concept: Skynet might as well have sent back a spear taped to a typewriter. It’s actually the mundane creep of technology that scares me most. You don’t need a killing machine with lasers to eradicate a species that divides its time between taking selfies and following a pizza on GPS. The machines have already won.
As a glimpse into the future, the first episode of Humans (ABC2) seemed similarly rather dated. Exported to Australia from the UK, where it was Channel 4’s biggest drama in 20 years, this is show about a world where menial tasks have been handed over to “synths”, sort of like the replicants from Blade Runner except that instead of whimsically crying in the rain they do useful things like carrying your shopping.
Already there’s a problem. Seeing a synth burdened with shopping bags leaves me unconvinced. In the near future, won’t drones be leaving groceries on our doorsteps, like creepy flying stalkers with a fresh produce fetish? Then there’s a synth handing out the free newspaper at a train station. Really? Print newspapers in the future? And for all the advances in robotics, apparently these characters still use “house phones” which, for those of you who can’t remember, are like mobiles you have to share with other people if they live with you.
It’s in the little details that Humans seems to be overexcited by its own premise. It’s as if they’ve thought: “In the future, robot slaves will do everything for us.” Synths are so overused in this universe I was waiting for a scene where, instead of going to the toilet, the protagonist just poos into a robot’s hands which dutifully ferries the deposit to the nearest ocean for him.
As with all the house phones, this society’s values have also happily remained in stasis while technology has progressed. Father, Joe Hawkins (Tom Goodman-Hill), is having to deal with domestic chores while his wife (played by Katherine Parkinson) is away. On seeing a messy pile of shoes he obviously can’t cope with, he immediately sets off to the shops to get a synth.
This seems a drastic reaction. If you burn some toast you don’t go and hire a professional, in-house chef. It’s a tiresome old hat plot that relies on pointing out how hopeless a husband is without his wife around the house. To make matters worse, the robot he buys is a sexy femail robot, because obviously it’s not getting the chores done that’s the key issue here, it’s the gender of the person doing them. Cue lots of shots of the teenage son awkwardly gawking at the robot’s bottom.
Honestly, if tablets, smartphones, and cute app icons have taught us anything, it’s that the future will be a sleek, sexless existence, not one populated by hot robots. No one’s going to buy an Apple Watch with a penis bulge. Humans treads old philosophical ground and seems to ignore the fact that technology is becoming less prominent in our lives at the same time as increasing its grip. We’re completely overrun by machines without even noticing it – that’s what’s really terrifying.
