(7x07) Nurbal Colony: Part 3, Episode 1
United together under their newly-elected leadership, the colonists continue struggling to rebuild in the ruins of Entu. But development of the colony is slow-going, and even with the advanced technology brought and employed by the Nurbal. Of greatest benefit among the technology the Nurbal brought with them are various general-purpose robots capable of assisting in many mundane chores. But that technology still has a bottleneck in the number of Ehrban available to oversee it, and with such a limited colony so far that number is still very small.
Thus far, erring on the side of caution, the Nurbal have always used the Machine as a central advisory system for devising and coordinating plans to be carried out by the Nurbal, with their willing cooperation. Likewise they have always, for safety, limited the artificial intelligence of the robots to carrying out natural-language instructions given them by the Nurbal, with little autonomy. There have always been organic minds in the middle between the superintelligence and the automatons.
But with so much work needing to be done so quickly, and comparatively so few people capable of doing it even with the Machine's intelligence and the robots' labor to assist, a few among the Nurbal eventually suggest a crazy idea: to allow the Machine to directly control the automatons, and give it orders to build out and maintain the colony for the benefit of the colonists, so that they can bring the rest of them out of stasis sooner and all get on with their lives.