‘Humans’ Cancelled After 3 Seasons. No Season 4.

That is not at all what I meant. “Humans” always dealt with politically progressive themes – which is why it was such a good show. (And I don’t even mean metaphors. If humanity ever really manages to create self-aware artificial intelligence, then we’ve basically created a slave race, which would not be good for anyone – neither the oppressed androids nor human society that would necessarily revert back to cruel attitudes to justify the oppression. Plus, you know, the unemployment problems that we already get from automated factories and soon self-driving taxis / trucks. So we better start thinking about the social and ethical ramifications of this potential development now, before we get surprised by the problems it creates. This is exactly what good sci-fi is for: the “what if” of the influence on society that current technological trends could have. By the way, a good British sci-fi book that explores this angle (in a funny and rather raunchy manner, since the protagonist is a former sex bot) is “Saturn’s Children” by Charles Stross. It’s not really about a robot rebellion or anything that obvious (it’s set in the far future, after humanity has long gone extinct for natural reasons, leaving all the many and varied robot servants to go on exploring the universe without their masters) and the plot is really more a mix of spy thriller and a parody of the old pulpy “planetary adventure” genre from the 1950s/1960s, but it’s still a book I would recommend to anyone who still thinks hard-coding sentient/sapient robots with Asimov’s Three Laws is a good idea. Bonus points for having one of the “hardest” (most realistic) approaches to long-distance space travel that I’ve ever seen in sci-fi. Which rather leaves you with the impression that we will absolutely NEED A.I. robots to spread our species and the rest of Earth lifeout to the stars – so you better hope that this entire ethical discussion doesn’t turn out to be moot because sentience cannot be artificially created.)

Anyway, what lead me to give up on this show was how they started more and more to treat the android technology as if it was plain magic. I forget what the straw that broke camel’s back was exactly – it’s been a while since I watched season 3, though I do remember being extremely disappointed by the season finale. I think it was partly the android religion nonsense and then I think at the end they found out that androids can make babies with humans? And I was just like: No. I will believe that you can build androids that are hard to distinguish from humans. But that they have egg/sperm cells that can fuse with human egg/sperm cells? WTH. That is not how technology works. That is not how biology works. If they have cells with DNA – and DNA that is this close to humans, too – then they’re not androids at all. They’re just clones. And they should not have differently colored blood or brains that work like computers. That’s why I wrote “jumped the shark” – the writers introduced a new plot element that destroys the entire premise of the show.