Detroit: Become Human released an MTV Cribs edition of sorts. The video is a prelude to the events in game, and goes walking and talking through Mr. Kamski's manufacturing plant. It shows a news network conducting an interview with the jeans-and-hoodie-wearing richest man alive that put an android in every home.
Kamski states that his intention with CyberLife androids is to remove the most menial tasks from humans' everyday lives so that those same humans have more time to live their lives. We see CyberLife factory workers wrapped up in clean-room suits (don't breathe on the merchandise!) as androids, packaged like person-sized Barbie dolls, are transported down a hall on wheeled hoverboards. Kamski shows how the androids are made, using machines to manufacture machines. Kamski's interaction with a fresh-off-the-factory-line android is, as you would expect, very much like an interaction between Handlers and Actives in Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. It's customer-service friendly and perfectly vacant.
But androids haven't just taken over the laundry and the dish washing. In Detroit: Become Human, androids represent 80 percent of all university professors, and 63 percent of all medical staff. "Tomorrow," Kamski says, "they'll replace our soldiers and, maybe, our leaders." And that's the stuff getting the humans all fired up at the beginning of Become Human. The androids haven't just replaced humans in the jobs nobody wants. They've replaced humans in many of the most prestigious and highest-paying jobs in the country. Even the military, where the cost of human life is one of the only things that keep the cost of war in perspective, is to be replaced by an android that, with the flip of a switch, doesn't have to experience the horrors of war. But that part hasn't happened yet. What has happened is that unemployment is now at 28 percent. That's higher than the unemployment rate in the US during the Great Depression.
Kamski, however, likens such skyrocketing unemployment rates to when the steam engine was invented. The steam engine caused high unemployment. But no one today would want to turn back the clock on such progress. And progress, Kamski says, is inevitable. But for a guy that's seemingly thought of everything, there's one thing he thought would never happen: that the machines would ever become more than machines.
And thus we lay our scene.
Detroit: Become Human launches on PS4 this Friday, May 25. Our review will be up the day before.
