IN DOSTOYEVSKY’S existentialist novel The Brothers Karamazov, the character Ivan raised an interesting proposition, “If god is dead, then everything is permitted.” It is a claim that posits the idea that there is no moral or ethical impulse in a world bereft of a maker and that human beings, by nature, are driven by baser instincts. Of course, the Russian author does not endorse such a hedonistic and atheistic view of the world but actually argues for the opposite, a meaningful and thought-out existence instead of the blind obedience practiced by the religious.
I am reminded of this ethical problematique after viewing the first season of HBO series Westworld. The premise of the series is interesting. We have come so far advanced in harnessing technology that we can “print” live and breathing human clones, androids, who play the role of “hosts” in a man-made desert carnival, run and operated by an entertainment company. The manufactured actors’ sole purpose is to entertain and satisfy the most carnal and basest desires of their rich human visitors who are drawn to the park’s different take on an immersive and participative adventure.
There is a simple rule in the park that draws on Ivan Karamazov’s dilemma - the hosts can be maimed, abused, and raped. They can be practically treated as playthings, since they can be stitched up and reprogrammed anyway. On the other hand, the visitors can be harmed but cannot be killed. In this skewed moral universe, the consequences are real for the manufactured hosts trapped in a state of eternal recurrence but the human visitors are spared from the ultimate ramification of their actions. Allowed to do what they want where visitors play gods, Westworld raises another philosophical dilemma – what does it really mean to be human?
Westworld’s value, like all good products of popular culture, particularly in the science fiction genre, is in how it holds itself up as an illuminating mirror to human existence, its follies and both our major and minor tragedies. If we go by the series’ assessment of human beings as opposed to androids, one would be disgusted by our seeming impulse towards debauchery and oppression. It is at once very revealing but very familiar of our proclivity to do harm to others, especially those we consider to be lesser mortals like the androids inside the park.
The political economy that runs the Westworld theme park allow this anomic morality to take place. It is clear that the park operates as a business where the fees for entry are reserved only for the elite, and that the android hosts, just like the workers making profit for them in the real world, are mere playthings to be exploited and then discarded once their usefulness have been expended.
To render the host actors more lifelike and thereby more entertaining, the developers ponder on the question on what makes us human and they have discovered a working formula. To be human-like apparently is to add into the androids’ code, a dollop of memory, improvisation, and a third element. These are interesting theoretizations of what artificial intelligence must have in order to mimic humans. At the same time, it is an oblique answer to what defines us as human beings.
It is a question that many of the more engaging products of popular culture also mull over. The film Dark City also highlighted the role of memory in creating human consciousness. The 1998 film had aliens injecting manufactured memories into their abducted humans in a grand social experiment involving their abducted humans.
In Westworld, they regard memory, beautifully labelled by the original programmer as the code that allows for “reverie”, as the element that provides the background narrative that defines every androids’ character, the cornerstone of their personality. Indeed, identity and personality are dependent on our experiences and the resulting fictions and narratives generated from these.
But the great sociological insight of Westworld is in its acknowledgement of an important element that tie narrative and will, what the series refer to us memory and improvisation, to the final ingredient that completes the achievement of human consciousness. It is also the grand revelation at the end of the ten-episode series that make for a wholly satisfying intellectual ending. Often, science fiction over reaches in terms of ambition, and sacrifices the grand questions in favor of entertainment or the character’s narrative arc. But Westworld achieves both in a finale that makes the ten-hour investment seem too short.
What makes us human is also the great riddle that the characters in the series are also trying to figure out. The last all important element is the inner voice that each and every one of us wields. In sociology, we call this as the ability for reflexivity or our propensity to see the relationships between ourselves and others; our past, present, and futures; that animate us to act and break the chains that bind us. It is, indeed, revealing of our dystopic future that the androids in Westworld end up becoming more human than the humans who made them.