NEW YORK, Aug. 11 (UPI) -- Justified and Deadwood icon Timothy Olyphant says playing the synthetic Kirsh on Alien: Earth made him realize just how fast artificial intelligence technology is advancing in the real world.
"You can get [news] articles read by AI. It has gotten so good so quickly, those voices, where, in the beginning, you could tell there was an odd rhythm to them, and I remember thinking, 'Oh, so, this really is a thing where there could just be people around that aren't human and appear human in almost every way, that we probably don't have to dress it up much [for the show],'" Olyphant told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
"But it never occurred to me, the idea of putting people's brains and memories into synthetic bodies was on our doorstep and it appears as though it might be on our doorstep," he laughed. "And that's really quite shocking."
Premiering Tuesday on Hulu and FX in North America, and Disney+ internationally, the eight-episode series was created by Noah Hawley and takes place two years before the events of the 1979 sci-fi classic Alien, in a universe where corporations are more powerful than countries.
Olyphant stars as Kirsh, a synthetic at Prodigy's futuristic Neverland Research Island facility, where a group of humanoid robots with human consciousness are charged with finding and neutralizing the terrifying monsters who escape a spaceship crash on Earth.
