"I'm the most normal person you know," tech billionaire Paul LeBlanc tells his worried daughter on the phone as he rushes through his mansion in a bathrobe, ramming nails into surveillance cameras and old hard drives.
There is no paranoia when the threat is real.
An artificial intelligence escaped from the California server laboratory via the Internet, LeBlanc is certain.
This is due to his brother's company, which kicked him out because he wanted to prevent the disaster.
An eccentric Silicon Valley billionaire warns of the dangers of artificial intelligence. The concept sounds familiar and is embodied in the real world by Elon Musk. His quote: "We conjure up demons with artificial intelligence", opens the series "neXt" and causes viewers to roll their eyes for the first time after just a few seconds. "Mad Men" star John Slattery plays the disgraced Silicon Valley legend Paul LeBlanc as a charismatic cross between Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, who is so bored with his mundane interlocutors that he interrupts them at the first opportunity .
Maybe he's in a hurry, because LeBlanc suffers from a deadly nervous disease that only allows him to live for a few months and which plagues him with hallucinations. The AI is apparently in a hurry, because the first murder is not long in coming. Artificial intelligence called “Next” makes short work of a professor who knew too much. On the way to world domination, the AI murders in a creative way - without any conflicts of conscience - and hacking into aircraft cockpits, ventilators or - in the case of the professor - autonomous driver assistants. FBI cyber agent Shea Salazar (Fernanda Andrade) also becomes aware of this when LeBlanc suddenly stands in the driveway and warns of the impending end of the world. The hunt for the AI that has escaped is developing into a game of cat and mouse, in which the question quickly ariseswho is actually hunting whom here. Because the danger lurks for the unequal investigator duo in every combination of circuits, from the surveillance camera to the vacuum cleaner robot. Every sudden flash of a device shows: Next is watching and listening carefully.
British mathematician's idea
The Californian home of FBI agent Salazar turns into a nasty sideshow when the language assistant hijacked by Next encourages the nine-year-old son with a sensitive computer voice to steal his father's gun from the safe in order to solve the bullying problems at school.
Together we see the protagonists Salazar and LeBlanc, horrified, staring at screens or alternately exchanging punchlines and scientific gibberish.
The formula of an overpowering artificial intelligence is well known and has not been implemented experimentally here - although "neXt" pursues an exciting approach.
The machine villain of the series is based on the idea of the so-called intelligence explosion of the British mathematician IJ Good.
As a result, a machine that can access the collective knowledge of humanity online could trump the intelligence of our species.
Since an artificial intelligence can teach itself its own blueprint, it would simply improve and, as a result, become even better at improving itself.
For everyone who finds the Alexa box scary
That would be an endless positive feedback loop that "neXt" picks up on, but reduces any emerging complexity with a hair-raising simplified explanation. Why is AI so obsessed with world domination in the first place? Series creator Manny Coto (“24”, “Dexter”) seems to have suspected that his technical framework is hardly sufficient for entertainment, and wrote a slightly clichéd family drama as a background story for each main character. The artificial intelligence in "neXt", however, reaches a level of self-knowledge that one would also wish for the screenplay by Manny Coto.
Next balances more or less skillfully between classic police drama and science fiction doomsday thriller.
The warning against digital surveillance capitalism is simply packaged and a quantum leap away from the philosophical quality of sci-fi competition like Alex Garland's “Devs”.
For the broadcaster Fox, the experiment seems to have failed.
The series was not renewed after the first season.
“NeXt” nonetheless offers exciting, albeit old-fashioned, entertainment for everyone who is slowly getting scary about the Alexa box in their living room.
neXt runs in double episodes on Mondays from 8.15 p.m. on Pro Sieben.