'Brave New World' Episode 7 Review: AI Indra's final solution for humans to find happiness is death
Ever since we saw AI Indra play the strategy game "Go" against World Controller Mond and win, we knew there was trouble brewing. The fascinating part of episode 7, is seeing Mond travel to the forgotten ruins on which New London was built and the lab where she and the others created the soma drug and AI Indra, who looks like her younger self.
As she digs into the detritus there to find clues to AI Indra's behavior, the AI Indra lays it out for her. The problem, she says are humans always wanting what they cannot have, always finding ways to be unhappy, no matter what is delivered to them.
You can sense the frustration of an alien machine intelligence tasked with the job of creating a "perfect world". While she is "perfect", in her own words, the "simulations" she creates are not and it is because of humans.
To AI Indra, the New World is another simulation she is running, probably like the millions she has run before in the confines of a lab. When Mond screams that this one is not a simulation -- "It's real", AI Indra reacts with puzzlement. "I don't understand what you mean by that," she says.
To solve the "human" problem of unhappiness, she has decided to play the "suicide move" in the game of strategy to fulfill "her directive" by her "mother" Mond to maintain stability at all costs. AI Indra's 'solution' as Mond tells a frightened Henry Foster is "death".
We can only assume that what AI Indra is planning is the death of all the humans and usher in everlasting stability and peace through the death of the rats in the maze she tends to. It makes perfect logical sense to a non-human intelligence like AI Indra to think of a solution like that.
The B-plot of the episode which involves the unhappy love triangle between John, Lenina and Bernard, shows that AI Indra is not wrong in her analysis. Even when she has made happiness the prime directive, humans don't follow orders as well as she does.
John, Lenina and Bernard figure out a way to make each other unhappy through jealousy, possessiveness, and competition. The root of it is of course "feelings". John, exhausted by what he is putting himself and Lenina through, goes to Helm Watson to have them "removed". This is in essence what AI Indra has also tried to do -- blunt the affect of New Worlders through soma and conditioning.
AI trying to solve the "human condition" has been explored in sci-fi literature before like in Margret Atwood's 'Oryx and Crake' and more famously in the 'Matrix' movies, which originally had envisioned an AI-intelligence birthed by the computing power of the networked brains of all living humans, much like what is shown in 'Brave New World' -- a sort of advanced, embedded internet. We all know what happened in the 'Matrix' trilogy, but what does AI Indra have in store for us?
'Brave New World' premiered on July 15 on Peacock and is available to stream.