Viewers of Apple TV's recent sci-fi series Plur1bus have been quick to indicate eerie similarities to modern concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) – even when that's not the manufacturer's intention.
Writer and producer Vince Gilligan – who also created “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” – told Polygon He wasn't enthusiastic about AI when he got here up with the thought for the series:
Because that was about eight or ten years ago. Of course, the term “artificial intelligence” existed before ChatGPT, but it surely wasn’t within the news prefer it is today. (…) I'm not saying you're improper (…) Many people make this connection. I don't wish to tell people what this show is about.
In Plur1bus, an alien-created “virus” involves Earth and begins infecting everyone. While the infected remain physically untouched, they’re deprived of emotions and individual consciousness. They grow to be a part of a single collective “hive mind.”
This plot may sound familiar when you've seen Don Siegel's 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which was remade by Philip Kaufman in 1978 and adapted several times since. It returns in Plur1bus, but with some key differences.
In the primary episode, we meet Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), a cynical, alcoholic romance novelist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After the US Army uses an alien DNA sequence to create a virus that infects almost everyone on Earth, Carol (whose wife Helen dies from the infection) is one in all eleven unaffected survivors around the globe.
The infected usually are not killed or was rabid zombies. They grow to be perfectly completely happy and helpful – seemingly harmless. Carol may very well be the last miserable person left alive.
Apocalypse as allegory
Just just like the Body Snatchers movies were read as metaphors for paranoia in the course of the Cold War and after WatergatePlur1bus begs to be read as an allegory.
The Latin title means “many” and evokes the collective mass infected by the virus. However, Plur1bus is a more concrete reminder of the United States motto: “out of many, one.”
Early reviews suggest quite a lot of meanings, including a metaphor for contemporary lonelinessand an allegory of ladies Oppression in abusive relationships.
In episode two, Carol tries to persuade other survivors to defy the hive mind – but not less than one survivor wishes she could join them and grow to be like everyone else.
Americans are politically polarized; Those on the opposite side of the controversy see their opponents as completely different or alien.
Perhaps Plur1bus offers a portrait of a person who desires to escape a conformist crowd. What is it wish to imagine in something that sets you other than the remaining of the world?
An extraterrestrial intelligence
Body snatchers found terror in human characters devoid of any inner self. Instead, Gilligan packs Plur1bus with images of all of human interiority and knowledge rolled right into a single unit. Each “individual” has access to a synthesized totality of all memories, experiences, insights and skills.
One of probably the most profound motifs within the exhibition are the pictures of humans working as machines, with all acts of information and skill divorced from the individuals in whom they were developed.
Infected military scientists wipe petri dishes with metronomic perfection; A jetliner is piloted by a waitress from TGI Friday's; A 9-year-old boy demonstrates the knowledge and skills of a gynecologist. Each person holds the secrets of everyone else's mind, including Helen's memories of Carol.
Whatever Gilligan had planned when he conceived the show and wherever he takes it, its central structure has undeniable resonance in a world saturated with expressions of AI.
With the exception of Carol and a handful of other survivors, every character we see is, in some sense, not a personality in any respect – just the outward appearance of a person, behind which lies a contrived synthesis of all of the others.
There is a haunting moment towards the tip of the second episode: one in all “them” seems saddened by her separation from Carol and casts a wistful look back as they part. This can also be reflected firstly of the third episode, with Carol's impassive stare upon the Northern Lights and a scene by which it's not possible to inform whether we're seeing two pilots before or after the alien infection takes hold.
What does it mean to be moved by signs of feeling emanating from a being who we suspect will not be an individual in any respect? What does it mean to outsource our self-expression to an inhuman consciousness? What would we grow to be?
Fortunately, with Plur1bus we are able to enjoy a depth of inventive insight that, for now, stays only human.
