Robots and Racism: Almost Human (2013) Explored the Intersection

The hard scifi TV series stars Michael Ealy who faces discrimination by fellow detective Karl Urban not because he is Black but because he is a robot.

Robots have been a metaphor for racism, slavery, discrimination, and oppression since R.U.R., Karel Capek’s very socialist play that created the term “robot.” But in science fiction rarely presents humanoid robots with any diversity. The exception is HBO’s Westworld, which gets kudos for having a Robot of Color (perhaps ROC instead of POC is a good term1), notably Maeve, as a main character. Meanwhile, in real-life, researchers in human-robot interaction have been studying if we treat humanoid robots differently based on their color; the answer appears to be “yes, we do.” 

Almost Human is set in a near future where the social fabric of civilization has frayed into a Blade Runner noir vibe and the Bad Guys are more technologically sophisticated than the police. The solution is, wait for it, robot cops. In a nice nod to RoboCop, Karl Urban (Skurge from Thor: Ragnorak, Bones from Star Trek, Eomer from LOTR, … ok pretty much everything) is a human detective who has lost a leg to one of the quasi-techno mobs. Unlike Will Smith in I, Robot, a prosthetic limb isn’t an affront, just something else to remember to charge. The joke is that Kennex doesn’t have problems with his African-American, Latino, or female colleagues on the force, but he doesn’t like or trust the synthetic ones. So, of course, Kennex is now paired with a DRN model android, called Dorian- D R N, get it? Dorian, played by Michael Early (Barbershop, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Think Like a Man... ok pretty much everything too), had been shelved because the “synthetic soul” programming framework for the DRN models produced some unstable androids who cared too much and were driven crazy by the harsh realities of police work. The ebony-and-ivory, salt-and-pepper pairing echoes the Lethal Weapon series, as Kennex (the white guy) isn’t too fussy about regulations and Dorian (the black robot) is always try to work within the system. The series is populated with other recognizable actors: Mackenzie Crook (Pirates of the Caribbean) gets to play a hacker version of Ducky from NCIS and Lili Taylor is outstanding as the tough but fair department head last seen in Law and Order. John Larroquette puts in an amazing vignette as Dorian’s creator. is he a good guy? A bad guy? A good guy gone bad because of exonerating circumstances? We’ll never know because Fox cancelled the series after 1 season. Fox cited the costs of the series given the relatively low viewership; fans cited the “no one learned from Firefly” decision to show the episodes out of order.

The series is fairly traditional, with the plots either the police procedural of the week or mythology episodes moving towards resolving the meta plot lines (Who set up Kennex and cost him his leg? What are those extra memories doing in Dorian’s head? What is behind the Wall?) 

The episodes often had nuggets of thoughtful, realistic robot technology.

• The Pilot episode throws out that what makes Dorian and the synthetic soul programming framework different is that it is based on predicate calculus. Kudos for mentioned predicate calculus, which is a staple of artificial intelligence for reasoning and interference using deductive logic since the 1960s. It’s only a bit of an ouch-er that the predicate calculus would not support the type of intuition Dorian is talking about. See more science and scifi about robot reasoning here.

• Disrupt is about an Internet of Things smart house with a lethal security system- the robot house trope.  A nice plot point is that while having a lethal home security system is well-motivated and legal, it is not particularly a wise choice. See more on smart houses and domestic robotics here.

• Beholder explores facial recognition and how it is relatively easy to confound the systems with a particle spray to temporarily confuse the computer surveillance recognition systems- illustrating some of Gary Marcus’ criticisms of the hype about AI in Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust. See more science and scifi about computer vision here.

• Throughout there is the concern over Dorian's emotions. See more about the science and scifi of emotions in robot here.

It was a shame that Almost Human was mishandled and never found an audience. It has the same humanity of Firefly and the same studio mishandling. Like Firefly, the network Did Not Get It. The episodes were shown out of order and cancelled after the first season. There was no Almost Human movie to wrap up the plotlines but it is still worth watching the single season despite the hanging threads.