Russia's 'Better Than Us' and the Future of AI

"Better Than Us," Netflix's first original streaming series from Russia, transports audiences to a city only 10 years in the future, where robots serve the population in a variety of positions, some have even replaced humans for certain jobs. They look like the humans they serve, though there is a detached air to their presence and slightly stilted way of moving that make them visibly different. Netflix describes the series as "cyberpunk." Popular culture entertainment is often a way for us to imagine a scenario or event that may never occur in our individual lifetimes. Imagining a future, say, where artificial intelligence (AI) has been integrated into society not simply as a complex web of computational frameworks as we acknowledge and accept it currently, but in the form of robotics that look, and act similar to humans.