Metaphors of the show.

What do you mean by metaphors?
Can you list any example scenes where you were confused?

The metaphors are like my top favorite item of this show. They take todays society problems and put them from the perspective of a robot-society. There was this item in the first season (spoiler) where hubots weren't allowed in clubs. This feels like a metaphor for refused migrants in certain clubs (there were real trials about that). In season 2 (spoiler) there's a debate going on about whether or not hubots can marry people, which is a clear metaphor for the whole gay-marriage thing (take note that one preacher is fine with it and the other one is not). I bet they will touch the issue if hubots are allowed to have children or not.

I think the metaphors is one of the reasons why this show was created in the first place. The Akta Manniskor movement hints towards far right violent groups. To take things to the top, you could say Akta Manniskor is a group that only wants "real" Swedish people in the society (like the True Fins party in Finland). This is a serious dare from the creators. The subjects are so explosive it would be hard to name them literally without masking them as robot-issues.

If you're familiar with the political situation of Sweden, it's pretty obvious the entire series is a reflection of that.

The most in-your-face issue would be immigration. The director doesn't exactly attempt to hide that this is the real main theme of the series. It's loaded with a bombardment of uncritical pro-immigration messages, though that's not so strange, taking the current situation in Sweden in question. An alternative title could be "Sweden-Democrats, no thanks".

Second up would probably be the support of the criminalization of prostitution in Sweden. Especially early in the series there's a lot of very unsubtle references to the issue.

Thirdly, the show has heavy feminist undertones, at certain points (notice, for example, the difference between female human - male hubot and male human - female hubot relationships). But it's practically political dogma in Sweden at this point, so it's naive to expect any production from there not having such.

And generally, the theme is "towards the all-accepting society". It denounces all forms of the "us and them" political outlook.


I still found it enjoyable, since characters like Beatrice and Roger add some much needed nuance and escape from a boring and perfect set of characters. I certainly won't shed a tear if all scenes with Tobias and Matilda were to be cut in a later edition. God, they're so angsty (almost paralysingly so) and yet so unrealistically obedient and without a will of their own.
And of course, the hypothetical ethical question posed more as a support for today's politics, is interesting in itself. To me there's no such thing as a soul (for anyone), and humans are just very evolved animals, who can be said to be biological machines. I also strongly doubt whether anything or anyone can really have 100 % free will, and therefore, if concept is real at all. If we did have machines developed to the state of self-conciousness and self-autonomous action, I'd say they would be like us, with a few reservations.

The only issue with that is that as of today that's not a very realistic possibility. I don't see it being desirable to develop robots in the path of hubots, either - imo it's important to maintain some small amount of the "Uncanny Valley" feeling. In any case, most "robots" don't need to be human-like - that's already the case today, i.e. in the car industry. Robots today are basically just machines with advanced self-calculation abilities and I don't see the benefit of adding more intelligence to a machine that just needs to do one simple job quickly and efficiently.