The first of Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics held that robots cannot harm a person or allow a person to be harmed through inaction. Sunny, a twisted techno-satire on Apple TV+, asks: What if they could?
Set in an alternate present Japan in which roving friendbots that resemble chest-high iMacs are common companions, the show follows a woman who believes her son and engineer husband died in a plane crash. She learns that her husband was working on a hush-hush project involving those robots—and that it’s possible to override their safeguards in order to make them violent.
Along with a cocktail bartender and friendbot named Sunny, who was programmed especially for her, the protagonist follows a series of clues to find out what really happened to her family. She discovers that the smiling friendbots may not be so friendly, but that a murderbot can sometimes be useful.
Sunny‘s idiosyncratic humor and violence won’t be for everyone. But the show takes seriously the idea that technology is neither inherently good or bad: Our friendbots, and our murderbots, are what we make of them.
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