No main plot to see
But cool sci-fi ideas
Are touched on nicely
So, yeah, Gene of AI episode 3, where we address the common fact that people tend to form emotional bonds with their things even when those things don’t do emotional bonding back. So, when they even mimic proper humanity, and especially in a future where the line between “human” and “not human” is blurred, of course there are going to be complications.
Specifically, this episode deals with robots, which are distinct from Humanoids in (at least supposedly) not having inner worlds or true emotions to their existences, allowing them to act as fancy tools and property for humanity. There are two robot-related cases: one of a woman with a rented boyfriend bot she has to come to terms with giving up now that she’s fallen for an authentic person, and one about a boy and his robot teddy bear, who is showing a few glitches thanks to age.
There’s overall more focus on the boy and his bear, and the emotional complexity of the family. His mother got him the bear (used, but supposedly through a factory reset) when she was a single mother so he wouldn’t feel lonely or afraid when she worked late, but has grown to resent the machine since it seems to have supplanted her role as primary emotional support rather than supplementing it, made more complicated by the fact that she’s now married so the kid has an extra parent figure in the picture. They take the bear to our leading doctor when it’s having unspecified trouble, but the mother isn’t exactly happy at his ability to fix it.
And yes, it’s acknowledged that proper robots aren’t exactly the doctor’s wheelhouse, but I suppose since “biological body” was mentioned as an option for humanoids, some don’t have that and so a lot of the same skills will be transferable.
After the fix, due to memory allocation, the bear acts up again, looking for someone with a name the family has never heard, identified as probably a former owner, the memory of which was deprecated but never properly destroyed, and thus came back when the prior memory issue was fixed.
On the other side, the woman goes through with the change-over, but seems to be hurting bitterly all the way. In the end, we get two critical scenes with her: one where she’s seeing her boyfriend bot off and the bot talks with the boy and his bear about what it means to be a robot, and one later where she’s visiting the doctor, devastated by what she’s done and he tells her what she needs to hear even contrary to his advice to the boy.
Said advice to the boy was, after an emergency fix on the bear (who got hit by a car trying to get the boy some help), admitting that it was impossible to be sure that a Robot doesn’t have a “heart”, along with a quick lookup of the former owner so that they could visit her grave and get robot closure.
So, I was unsure at first how totally the show was going to lean into being an anthology, but it seems to be more the case than I initially believed. I like that well enough, and while its slow pace probably means it’s not as gripping as it could be, it does touch resonant scenarios. So far, so good.