The Gene of AI

Episode 7

"Human" appears to be titled as a counterpoint to last week's episode "Robot," and the content certainly supports that. Whereas "Robot" found pockets of optimism in this future, "Human" returns to The Gene of AI's usual M.O. and explores the ways these technological advances have outpaced society's ability to grapple with the full breadth of their consequences.

The A half buries some important world-building in its conflict, which I like. I think this is the first time we get confirmation that Humanoids were not immediately granted equality upon their creation, and there was indeed a protracted civil rights struggle to earn them their liberty as people. While we don't get much more information beyond that, this helps color the issues that Gene brings forth this week. If Humanoids had to fight for those rights, then some Humanoids would perceive those rights as especially precarious, so they'd want to do anything to preserve them, i.e. to be perceived as “human” as possible. This might explain why Kenji might have been resistant to letting a super AI help him since this treatment could only be done by an inhuman entity on a Humanoid brain. This is, of course, assuming his son Satoshi wasn't making that up to avoid reviving his abusive father.

Despite all the AI accouterment, the struggle in the first story deals with entirely human problems like deception and hypocrisy, and neither side comes out of it clean. That narrative sympathizes with Satoshi's side more, though. I don't think there's a good ethical argument for not treating Kenji, even if he was a complete bastard, but you can understand why Satoshi would have been tempted by the serendipity of his father's accident. The Humanoid Rights Japan representative, on the other hand, looks like an asshole by the end. Despite him accusing the Goto family of sensationalizing their patriarch's case for personal gain, his main quarrel is that they're preventing him from sensationalizing the case for his own sake. This smells extra rank because the HRJ cause is fundamentally a noble one, so seeing it twisted like that feels all the more hypocritical.

This leads to my favorite moment of the episode, in which Sudo tells the rep he couldn't care less about him wrangling with the consequences of his actions. That short exchange sums up both the tone and appeal of The Gene of AI. Sudo isn't here to heal any cultural divisions or solve any moral quandaries. He's there to practice medicine (and do a little black market moonlighting on the side). He's not a hero. What his patients do with his treatments is up to them. This approach helps the series feel provocative yet rarely preachy. This week's episode is arguably the most preachy the show has ever been, but the narrative still restrains itself from broadcasting its thoughts to the audience. It trusts viewers to digest these themes and arrive at their conclusions informed by the perspectives presented.

Let's look at the second half, which focuses on customer service, a field that's no stranger to AI in our present day. This is also a field where, in the abstract, automation makes a lot of sense. In most situations, user problems can be solved with a flowchart, and filtering those simpler issues out would mean better allocation of a company's limited human resources. But that's if we were living in a more Perfect World. Anybody who has worked any kind of customer-facing job has stories detailing the depths of human depravity. For many people, customer service is not about solving their problem; it's about unloading their frustrations onto a person whose job is to acquiesce to their requests. It's about feeling powerful by making someone else feel like dirt. You can't solve that with code. Or can you?

Gene, correctly, has nothing but sympathy for our second patient of the week. We see firsthand that customers lash him with hate speech questioning his humanity, and the stress from his job has chipped away at his physical and mental health, giving him ulcers and PTSD symptoms. He concludes that only an emotionless robot could do this work unscathed, and it's hard to disagree with him. Gene leans into this point with the absurd pettiness of the last customer's complaint. Nobody with a functioning heart and brain would conclude that a debatably incorrect shade of beige would warrant the utter deterioration of a simple working stiff's life. The customer's demand for a human apology is itself inhumane.

Therefore, the subcontractor's solution is to embrace that inhumanity, using robots to act out pre-programmed Laurel and Hardy routines designed to dupe and assuage customer anger. Given all the problems I just described, this seems like the perfect answer, yet it's undeniably disquieting both to the patient of the week and me as a viewer. While it's difficult to argue that this isn't better than sending a poor white-collar sap to get his ass chewed out every time there's a complaint, this doesn't sit well with me because it still does nothing to address the customer entitlement at the root of this problem. And that, I believe, is the crux of The Gene of AI's messaging. Advanced technology will not advance humanity. As Sudo says at the end of the episode, it's never that simple. We can't code our way out of our responsibilities to improve ourselves and society as a whole.

Rating:

Gene of AI is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Steve is on Twitter until the day it completely succumbs to the t-shirt bots. You can also catch him chatting about trash and treasure alike on This Week in Anime.