These fictional robots that look more and more like us
“Murderbot,” “Sunny,” “M3GAN”… Science fiction always raises contemporary questions. In the era of artificial intelligence, it's the fear of humans being replaced by machines that is taking over on both the small and big screens, analyzes the chief TV critic of the “New York Times.”
I know how I'm supposed to react to artificial intelligence (AI). Like anyone who manipulates words on a page, I fear that the great language models will relegate me to the garbage heap. I worry that intelligent machines will eventually supplant artists, eliminate jobs, establish a surveillance state—if not exterminate us, outright.
I feed these anxieties by reading article after article, articles obviously provided by the algorithms to which I have delegated a good part of my brain.
This is how I feel in real life. But when it comes to fiction, my dear fellow creatures, I am a traitor to my species. In any story where humans coexist with robots, I invariably prefer the fascinating, enigmatic, and persistent machines to those boring Homo sapiens.
And these days, despite the widespread anxiety about AI, or perhaps because of it, we're being offered a lot of robot stories.
The protagonist of Murderbot: Diary of an AssaSynth, a bloody sci-fi comedy [currently streaming] on Apple TV+, feels no such admiration for me.
The New York Times (New York)With 1,700 journalists, some 30 foreign bureaus, more than 130 Pulitzer Prize winners, and more than 11 million subscribers in total by the end of 2024, The New York Times is the leading daily newspaper in the United States, where one can read “all the news that's fit to print.”
Its Sunday edition includes The New York Times Book Review, an authoritative book supplement, and the unparalleled New York Times Magazine . The Ochs-Sulzberger family, who took over the editorship of this newspaper, founded in 1851, in 1896, still runs the center-left daily.
As for the web edition, which alone boasts more than 10 million subscribers by the end of 2024, it offers everything one would expect from an online service, plus dozens of dedicated sections. The archives include articles published since 1851, which can be viewed online from 1981.
Courrier International
