Humans is the latest entry in an ongoing moment for AI fantasies, and therefore can’t promise to break much ground. This year alone, Ex Machina explored artificial intelligence from its origins in Silicon Valley, and HBO’s Westworld revamp promises to show robots designed to be outlets for human vices. However, Humans is much more concerned with what it means for humans to live with robots in a world that already accepts them. What does it mean for family life? How does it change how we relate to other people? How might our robot servants want to relate to us if they somehow evolved? In that way, it’s an intimate look at what the future of Siri, Cortana, and Alexa might one day look like, and the philosophical questions both humans and machines will have to ask one another when that day comes.

If the singularity is coming for us, then it won’t arrive with a violent robot uprising but with the confused and cautious first steps of a new kind of human consciousness. That’s how writers Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley have approached Humans, AMC’s upcoming series about androids living among us . Set in a parallel present, the series is about a world where a robotic servant class known as synths live with humans as yet another everyday gadget. But rather than going down the typical thriller path of asking what artificially intelligent automatons might do to us if they became self-aware, Vincent and Brackley ask what happens to us when we form relationships with feeling machines.

Vincent and Brackley aren’t afraid of our smart machines. They’d rather think about how to expand what it means to be human. I recently spoke to them about Humans, machines, and what it means to be caught in between. Recently we've seen a lot of television and movies about living with AIs, particular humanoid AIs. Ex Machina, Almost Human. What makes 'Humans' differ? Jonathan Brackley: I think the main thing, and this is something that we've taken from the original Swedish show on which [Humans] is based, and that's that we approach it in a very grounded way through a domestic setting. It's a world that's just like ours. It's a parallel present. So we approach the show looking at this sort of ensemble of characters in very normal settings, houses, homes all around the UK and everything. So I think that's probably the thing that marks it out. Sam Vincent: Yeah, it's not a straightforward thriller. There's more to it. It's a family drama, it's a relationship drama. It's not set in the future, it's set today. It's not about the origins of this technology, [and] most stories are about the origins. We just start our story saying, these things have been around for 10 years. They’re just a fact of life and part of the fabric of our society now. The original Swedish version had that viewpoint, and it just opens up dozens more ways to examine the story, because you're now going in through a very human level of emotions, relationships, and you're not so worried about the genre aspects of the show, though they are there. These machines, for the most part, are treated like gadgets, despite the whole uncanny element of a person-shaped thing walking around with my family. How did you approach that emotionally? There must be some cognitive disconnect there. "What does AI change about human empathy?" SV: Yeah, I think there is, undoubtedly. If you had machines that looked and acted like us, and yet we know they're not us, we think that they don't have any thoughts and therefore we can treat them however we want, that's got to do strange things to people's heads. What would that do to the development of human empathy, if you can just kick [a synth] in the face because you've had a bad day, and it's like kicking your fridge? But it looks and feels like a human. Does that make you more likely to kick a human? Just as an example of one thought process that can kind of become warped by the presence of these things.

So do you think the Singularity is coming for us? SV: Yeah, next week. Thursday. JB: It's gonna be great publicity for the show! SV: We're getting ready. Well, the singularity... there's a lot of argument about what it means in AI. Some people just mean a certain level of when a computer system can operate on the sort of data level of a human brain, not necessarily do what a human brain can. Other people think it means the advent of "true AI," machines that can actually think and feel and make decisions of their own, and are self-aware. Some people think it'll happen in 20 years, and some people think it's a meaningless term. There's a lot of argument about it. I think we're very optimistic. We're not Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking or Bill Gates, the recent people who have warned against it... As I say that, I think, "Why am I not with them?" JB: Why are we blowing this? [Laughs.] SV: They know what they're talking about. But just how we feel about it personally, we don't feel that worried about it. We're not going to put the brakes on human progress. That's not going to happen, that's just not in our makeup. JB: It's up to us to prepare and adapt to the technology and be prepared to use it and develop it responsibly. As Sam said, it's not like we're going to stop. SV: We already invented nuclear weapons, and apart from two uses in wartime, they're all still there. We've had some near misses. Not great. But we're all still here. We've managed to hold those. And I was recently reading an article by one of the co-founders of a company called Deep Mind, and he just kind of [stated] that our intentions for artificial intelligence are for a tool. We're going to make it, we will make sure that it does what we want it to, and it's no different from anything else. "We're certainly not scared a robot uprising's going to kill us all." JB: We're certainly not scared a robot uprising's going to kill us all, and our show is absolutely not that. In the show, you have robots very much related to labor and work and serving humanity. But you also deal with how they develop relationships with us, even after they stop serving us. How far do you take that idea in the show? SV: Well, yes, that’s the level the show operates on. It's very much about what, as you say, comes after, what happens if they find some kind of higher purpose, or higher abilities within themselves. Then everything changes, for them and for us. That's the more speculative AI that's more fantastical, and really is an allegory for what's happening in our society today. Is the increasing automation with jobs [becoming] more and more of a threat as automation becomes more and more advanced? That very much is what we do in Humans and is very much an extrapolation of that. We're standing in for the process of automation of industry and labor that's been happening since the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. Really it's a process that's been going on a long, long time now. But those are the levels that the show is operating on. And we always wanted to examine both, [to] play with the higher ideas. What could happen if a machine became more than a machine, but also what happens in our society with the machines that we have now?