The defining scene of “Sense8,” the new sci-fi drama on Netflix, comes about halfway through the first season. It starts in San Francisco, where Nomi, a “hacktivist” and transgender lesbian, is making out with her girlfriend, Amanita. At the same time, in Mexico City, Lito, a smoldering actor, is lifting weights with his boyfriend, Hernando. In Berlin, Wolfgang, a safecracker, is relaxing, naked, in a hot tub. And in Chicago, Will, a police officer, is working out at the gym. The premise of “Sense8” is that Nomi, Lito, Wolfgang, and Will—along with four other “sensates” in Nairobi, Seoul, Mumbai, and Reykjavik—are telepathically linked. They are able to feel each other’s emotions, appear in each other’s minds, and even control each other’s bodies. In this instance, because they’re all feeling sexy, the sensates find themselves having an impromptu telepathic orgy. They’re a little freaked out until they realize that they can all enjoy Wolfgang’s hot tub simultaneously.
All sorts of crazy things happen in “Sense8.” There’s a big conspiracy that may explain how the sensates came to be linked. There’s sci-fi theorizing about human evolution and psychic phenomena. There are euphoric action sequences in which Sun Bak, the Korean sensate, deploys her acrobatic martial-arts skills. (Two of the show’s three executive producers, Andy and Lana Wachowski, were responsible for “The Matrix.”) When a car chase ensues, the sensates can take turns driving the same car. One episode includes a Bollywood dance number. Other scenes, in which the sensates combine their skills and consciousnesses to solve insurmountable problems, have a ludic, dance-like energy: in one of the show’s best moments, all eight main characters find themselves singing “What’s Up,” by 4 Non Blondes. In another scene, they all flash back to their own births while listening to Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto No. 5. (The Wachowskis have said that they filmed “live births” for the show, and, watching the scene, you believe it.)
In sci-fi speak, “Sense8” is about transhumanism—the idea that in the future, as a species, we might become more than we are right now. Julian Huxley, the brother of Aldous, coined the term in a 1927 book called “Religion Without Revelation,” in which he wrote that transhumanism was “man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” Huxley helped found the World Wildlife Fund and was the first director of UNESCO; he was also, for a time, the president of the British Eugenics Society. Like him, the transhumanist movement—which now tends to focus on high-tech enhancement—is both intriguing and scary.
“Sense8,” though, isn’t really about the negative aspects of transhumanism. It makes emotionally expansive telepathic empathy seem like a great idea—it’s global, sexy, useful, and romantic. The sensates become friends and even fall in love with one another. (Will, the Chicago cop, gets together with Riley, an Icelandic d.j.) In one scene, set at the Diego Rivera Museum, in Mexico City, Nomi, the transgender hacker, helps Lito, who is closeted, come out. “Sense8” is not subtle—this is sci-fi T.V.—but their scene together is simple, direct, and moving: there’s a lot of authentic emotion to go with all the artifice. (Slate has called “Sense8” a “queer masterpiece”; Jamie Clayton, the actress who plays Nomi, is transgender, as is Lana Wachowski.) Some people don’t like the sensates—an evil biotech corporation has it out for them, and some reviewers have found “Sense8” to be cheesy, nonsensical, and slow. Fair enough, but if you’re in the show’s target audience—if you rooted for Neo and Trinity’s romance in “The Matrix”—you’ll enjoy it. Despite its sci-fi premise, “Sense8” is almost entirely about strong feelings. It’s transhumanism for softies.
Sci-fi stories divide roughly into three categories. First, there are stories about regular people who just happen to live in the future, like “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.” Second, there are transhumanist stories, such as “Dune” and “Sense8,” in which human nature is somehow altered. And third, there are robot stories, in which human nature is, for the most part, fixed, the better to be inherited by our technological replacements—the Cylons in “Battlestar Galactica,” say, or Ava, the robot in Alex Garland’s recent film, “Ex Machina.” Many great works of science fiction weave these mini-genres together. In “2001: A Space Odyssey,” HAL inherits our flawed human nature and goes mad. At the same time, the film is a transhumanist tale, in which the ship’s surviving astronaut ascends to a new plane of consciousness. Transhumanist stories and robot stories are mirror images of each other. Robot stories ask whether our spiritual flaws will trickle down to the new beings we create; transhumanist stories ask whether they will propagate up into the beings we become.
Recently, in a wonderful essay in the New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn wrote about the ancient roots of the robot story. He pointed out that there are robots in the Iliad, and that robot tales address theological questions about creators and their creations. Today, though, stories about robots—particularly human-shaped ones—have come to feel a little quaint. Technology has made the “classic” robot obsolete. In “Humans,” a new show on AMC, robots that look and act like human beings are shown tending tomato plants on a farm. It’s a striking image, but we all know that, in real-life, agricultural robots are likely to be weird-looking. In “Ex Machina,” Ava, the robot played by Alicia Vikander, is a compelling femme fatale; even so, you can’t help noticing that, unlike every other piece of technology in the modern world, she isn’t networked, and can communicate with other robots only by speaking. Samantha, the artificial intelligence voiced by Scarlett Johansson in “Her,” seems more in sync with technological reality: she’s a cloud-based software program capable of realizing herself at many physical locations simultaneously, the same way Google appears on many screens at once. (Genisys, the evil A.I. in the new “Terminator” movie, operates on a similar principle.) This doesn’t make “Her” better than “Ex Machina,” but it does mean that, while “Her” seems to present a plausible vision of the future, “Ex Machina” feels more like a fable.
For a while now, robot stories have been shifting to the cloud. In the CBS show “Person of Interest,” two cloud-based A.I.s are locked in a power struggle, manipulating stock exchanges, operating shell corporations, and giving orders to acolytes who regard them with quasi-religious reverence. In Ann Leckie’s novel “Ancillary Justice,” a single intelligence, housed in a spaceship—a giant robot, in a sense—makes its presence felt through people, called “ancillaries,” whose bodies it controls remotely; in effect, it’s turned us into robots. This is a big reversal. Traditional robot stories tend to be Promethean: they’re about people who seize the forbidden and god-like power of creation. By contrast, artificial-intelligence stories are about people who invent their own god-like overlords. They know that the new gods are just complicated programs, but they end up subjugated by them anyway.
There’s always been some crossover between robot and transhumanist stories, because people, if they are transformed enough, can become “posthuman.” That process, too, has changed over time. In the 1965 novel “Dune,” the hero used a psychedelic drug to upgrade his consciousness; by contrast, in last year’s “Transcendence,” Johnny Depp uploaded himself into a quantum computer. But most transhumanist stories stop far short of total transformation, instead exploring the discrete consequences of highly specific transhuman upgrades. In “Starfish,” Peter Watts imagines a power station, located at a deep-sea vent, where physical modifications (replaced lungs, enhanced eyes) allow the workers to swim among the tube worms; some divers “go native,” developing a new sensibility suited for the sea floor. “Liking What You See: A Documentary,” a short story by Ted Chiang, takes place at a hyper-progressive liberal-arts college where the students have modified their brains so that they can’t distinguish between beautiful people and ugly people. (“For decades people've been willing to talk about racism and sexism, but they're still reluctant to talk about lookism,” one student complains.) Some professors think this is a great idea, because the hierarchy of personal beauty is “offensive”; others wonder how the new, beauty-blind student body is supposed to produce any great painters or sculptors. There’s a gleeful, brutal curiosity to these stories. They envision a future when our economic and cultural niches shrink and we change ourselves to fit within them. Today, we have subcultures; in the future, we’ll have subspecies.
Many transhumanist stories have a circular structure: they're about the rediscovery (or nostalgic appreciation) of old human virtues. The most optimistic transhumanist novel that I’ve read recently is Ramez Naam's “Nexus." Naam is a programmer by trade; in a previous life, he helped develop Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer. In his book, billions of people take a drug—actually a soup of nano-machines—that allows them to network their brains together, so that they can experience each other’s thoughts, sensations, and memories. Then, using meditation techniques that they’ve learned from Buddhist monks in Thailand, they synchronize their minds, merging into a single, vast consciousness. In this form, the transhumans must confront the menace posed by a “posthuman”: an intelligent Chinese computer system, based upon the mind of a gifted scientist, that controls weapons and other gadgets all over the world. On one level, “Nexus” is a libertarian techno-fable about how bottom-up innovation will win out over top-down systems of control. But it’s also wistfully old-fashioned—a paean to Buddhist meditators, who, when you think about it, probably came up with this whole transhumanism thing in the first place.
If you read a lot of science fiction in one go, you notice that it has two weaknesses. The first is the future, which tends to be complicated, depressing, and fatiguing to read about; the second is the aesthetic of futurism, which is grim and predictable. Everything is big, scary, and metallic (or else small, gross, and biotechnological). The implicit message of futurism is that human progress is inseparable from suffering; often, the only kind of beauty is terrible beauty. Futurism is what gives sci-fi its frisson. The supposedly horrific vision of the future in “The Matrix," for example, is also undeniably cool; the robots may have won, but the survivors look great in their leather and shades. This paradox makes the movie great, but it’s also a kind of trap—an aesthetic cynicism.
"Sense8,” though, is joyful, in part because it shows us transhumanism without futurism. It's not a superhero show, in which a random individual is elevated into something better; it hints, science-fictionally, at a fundamental change in human nature generally. At the same time, there’s no technological explanation—and, therefore, no futurist cost—for that change. (In one episode, it’s suggested that, in the distant evolutionary past, all human beings were once telepathic, but no one seems to care very much about this hand-wavey idea.) On some level, the sensates’ telepathic empathy is a metaphor for the Internet, which seems, in some ways, to be making us more open to others’ experiences (especially queer experiences). The show also evokes the joys of creative collaboration: people who watch the Wachowskis work together often say that they have “two bodies, one brain.” Really, though, the point of “Sense8” is to revel in the broadening of empathy—to fantasize about how in-tune with each other we could be. In its own, low-key way, therefore, “Sense8” is a critique of sci-fi. It asks whether, in tying our dreams about human transformation to fantasies of technological development, we might be making an error. The show suggests another path to transcendence: each other.
