Interview with Sam Vincent and Jon Brackley, writers of Humans

Explain a little bit about the concept of Humans.
S: Humans is set in a parallel present – or a world just around the corner, if you like, which looks and feels exactly like the world we live in, but for the one extraordinary difference that there are these highly lifelike androids in many, many homes and workplaces. Millions of them are operational across the world. They’re highly advanced, but they don’t think or feel – they are simply here to serve, as home help, carers for the elderly, and an endless array of menial jobs. The world has come to rely on them, and increasingly the economy is reliant on them too.

It’s inspired by a Swedish drama, Real Humans. How closely does it replicate that series?
J: We watched the show a long time ago – we watched all of it. The main characters are inspired by the original, but we’ve run with them and done our own thing. So they start off in a similar place to the original, but we take them on very, very different journeys.

How did the project come about? Did someone come to you having seen the original drama?
S: It was brought to us by Kudos. Jane Featherstone phoned us up – they’d won the rights to it, and she asked us if we wanted to do it, and we said we were interested. Then we watched the show, and it was such an interesting treatment of what could be a familiar idea, but in their hands had become something very different – and we felt it was a unique opportunity to explore such an interesting idea in a new way. So we agreed to do an adaptation.

What did you do in the way of research? Did you investigate the science behind Artificial Intelligence, for example?
S: We did. We did a lot of reading, we attended a couple of debates and talks and things, but principally reading. We read a lot. One book was highly technical but particularly helpful, and that was Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence. But we soon found that what we were talking about was so far advanced of anything that is currently viable. Just being able to have a conversation with a machine is so problematic. They’ve also had problems with picture learning, machines being able to visualise things. We realised we were imagining something whose capabilities were far more advanced than anything we could currently do.

There have been some well-publicised concerns recently that AI may pose the greatest threat to humanity. Do you think advances in this area are positive, or are we going to be wiped out?
S: Having done a lot of reading on this, you will discover that the quieter voices are quieter for a reason. The alarmist voices grab a lot of media attention, for obvious reasons. The really interesting question here is ‘What is anyone going to do?’ ‘Are they really going to put the brakes on this research?’ That seems like something that has never happened before in the history of scientific development. Are they just going to pull back from the brink? It’s going to continue down that road. I would say that I’m an optimist about it. I don’t think anything will be wiped out anytime soon. However, what it’s going to do to us, as people, is a much more complex question. That is one question we’re going to have to face, and something that we’re trying to explore in this series. We’re not so much dealing with the imminent annihilation of the human race as exploring what’s going to happen to us. How will it change us?

It’s quite a well-trodden path, the idea of robot underlings becoming our overlords. But this story doesn’t go down that line, exactly? It’s not another 2001 or I, Robot?
J: I think it’s more grappling with the philosophical ideas of what it means to be human. Does Artificial Intelligence necessarily mean that “you’re becoming more” – a greater sort of intelligence? Those are the ideas we’re looking to explore in the show, as opposed to androids versus humans. How we can live together, how we can integrate, what that means for both sides.
S: It’s more about what is happening to us, rather than ‘what will they do to us?’
J: Is our work part of what makes us who we are? And if we’re giving that over to something else, to do our jobs for us, our professions, or our washing and cleaning and cooking and looking after our children, what does that mean for us – if we’re giving that much of ourselves away? Are we becoming less, and they’re becoming more?
S: You’re right about it being a well-trodden path. There is, in essence, only one robot story – what are they going to do to us, and all robot stories essentially ask that question, from Isaac Asimov onwards. But we feel that this series gives us a chance to explore the question in a different way. It’s a domestic setting, it doesn’t take place in the far future, it lacks traditional science fiction tropes, it is very much explored through the now.

Hearing you talk about a technology-based cautionary tale set in the present day, but with elements of the futuristic, it sounds a little bit like Black Mirror. Do you see that link?
J: It’s interesting you call it a cautionary tale. We’ve taken care not to pass judgement on this world. We’re not presenting it either as a utopia or a dystopia. It’s a world that we think could happen, and we’ve tried to portray it as realistically as possible, and offer both sides of the argument.
S: Black Mirror wasn’t a direct inspiration. Humans was already commissioned by Channel 4 when we saw the episode with Domhnall Gleeson and Hayley Attwell, and we sat down to watch it with a great deal of trepidation. And fortunately Charlie’s idea went down a very different avenue. But certainly Charlie and everyone else who makes Black Mirror are interested in the same areas as we are. They explore them more through satire. Ours is a straightforward human drama.

Once you’d written the script, did you stay involved?
S: Yes, we were always feeding back on things to do with the script as the episodes were filmed and produced, and then afterwards, feeding back from the cuts and the edits and constantly working and tweaking and adding to it.

You must have been thrilled when the casting proved so fruitful
S: Yeah. We’ve been very lucky and of course, and an actor like William Hurt brings an extraordinary presence to the show. You have an actor like that, you’re able to articulate quite complex ideas. His character is somebody who really can articulate the philosophical and moral dilemmas of having these machines in our lives.
J: As can William himself. He’s an incredibly smart guy, really clued up on everything.
S: The entire cast is brilliant, it’s truly extraordinary. Not least the actors who are actually playing the synths themselves. There are so many pitfalls to avoid, and they have avoided all of them.
J: We really wanted to avoid clichés of robothood that you’ve seen in other TV and films. No quizzical head-cocking or anything like that. We described their movement as like a Japanese tea ritual – all grace and economy of movement. No movement is wasted.

You guys have been writing together for eight years. How does the process work? Do you sit in the same room all day? Do you fall out a lot?
S: Not about writing!
J: We always hash out the ideas in the same room, and talk through everything, outlining, brainstorming. We always do that together, so that by the time we come to writing, we’re always on the same page and we know exactly where we’re going. We don’t physically write together in the same room. We tried that once, and it took us about three hours to write a paragraph.
S: So once we know where we’re going, we split up, we each write something, then we pass it back and forth and endlessly cross-edit it.

How did working on Humans compare to working on Spooks? Is every project different in terms of the dynamic and how easy it is?
S: Yeah, every project is very different. For Spooks there was a much more episodic element. Humans is just one long story that unfolds a little more every week. With Spooks there was pretty much a self-contained story with a conclusion every week. But this was an immense challenge, when you have a large ensemble of characters and one big story, that’s a real brain teaser. There were certainly moments when we’d find ourselves staring at a blank page for episode six thinking “Wow. We’ve got to come up with something.” So that’s the challenge, but it’s also an opportunity. It’s incredibly exciting to be able to tell a story over eight episodes, so that you can go really deep into who those people are. It was really rewarding.
J: Also, Spooks was a pre-existing show – there were eight series before we joined for the last two, so it was already its own thing. With Humans, even though there was a pre-existing version Real Humans, it felt very much as though we were building our own world, and establishing what this show is and how it works. That was an immense challenge, but also a huge amount of fun.

If/when we end up with this brave new world, and we all have our own synths, what one menial task are you looking forward to never having to do again?
S: It’s so complicated. I’d be tempted to say ‘changing nappies’, but would I really want to have an artificial person having such an intimate moment. I know! Wiping down my son’s high chair. On the days when I have to do that three times a day, I would give anything not to do it for the third time.
J: I’ve got a three-month old daughter, so I’d say washing bottles. It’s the most boring and terrible thing in the world, and my hands are a terrible mess.