I'm so inspired by HBO's new show Westworld. Of the many themes of science fiction, artificial intelligence intrigues me most and it makes me the most uncomfortable, for reasons I don't fully understand. While cloning is not really the same thing as AI, the artificially created characters in Westworld seem very much like clones.
Kazuo Ishiguro wrote one of my favorite treatments of the ethical tension implicit in cloning, in his novel Never Let Me Go.
The clones in Never Let Me Go serve a very highly prized function in the world of the novel. Their organs are harvested for human use, and they are nurses for the dying and elderly. The tension for the reader (presumably not a clone) occurs with the tragic ability of the clones to love, and their desire to escape their fate.
Westworld, an update on a 70s sci-fi film, also has a human-serving cast of (computer-controlled) clones who serve as the "hosts" of a curated theme park where guests can interact with them with no legal limits or physical danger. They are not clones, not born and then developed as humanoid. The androids of Westworld are sculpted in labs, and implanted with an interactive interface, constituting their "personhood" in the park.
The hosts are never to lay an unwanted finger on a guest. They have a name, story, and background, seemingly as controllable as a video game character. They exist to serve the desires of the guests, however unsavory. They are lifelike to the extreme, able to mimic even the slightest of human gestures that signify intelligence.
The clones "act" in scores of complicated narratives that occur simultaneously in the park, and some have been updated and modified for decades. Their storylines have changed over the years. While the status quo has been to deny the hosts access to their past storylines, the main creator, Ford, has written a new gesture code that allows for some access in order to make the hosts appear as if they are remembering something in a subconscious way. Not direct access to the memory, but an unconscious awareness. Remembering, without thinking.
When a host with several character lifetimes accidentally accesses an old storyline, their behavior becomes erratic, and unpredictable. When a host seems to remember another time, another place, usually a trauma, they override their systems and behave outside of their code. These improvisations are so far outside their programming that they feel eerie and terrifying.
The androids are not a human having an experience., but they are a reflection of a human experiencing their humanity.
The similitude that shimmers between human reproduction and Westworld's system of android creation is a complicated web of desire, nostalgia, and as the show describes, "drives," emotional and instinctual impulses that give us a sense of purpose.
Already, in Westworld, as in Never Let Me Go, love is the most complicated drive of all. The father character of a young, beautiful "white woman on the frontier" character becomes inoperable after he sees a modern photograph of a woman. He doesn't recognize the woman, or the time and place in which she's photographed, and when he accesses his memory (files) he taps into an old horror storyline in which he was a cult leader, and quoted Shakespeare. The juxtaposition of Shakespeare's timeless queries into human nature are chilling transposed over the pseudo-crimes occurring in Westworld, and what could be described as a magic mirror of humanity in the form of the androids and their meddlesome memories which conflict with their current drives.
Westworld's Delores, the aforementioned woman android, is being questioned by a technician/creator, and she asks, representing every woman trying to play an acceptable role in a patriarchal world, "have I done something wrong?," to which the creator answers no, but as it becomes clear he wants their conversation stricken from the record, she asks him a far more intelligent question, "have you done something wrong?" The innocence of the android is only as certain as the quality of the original from whence it came.
The needs of the guests seem barbaric, lustful, and gratuitously mindless. However, the needs of the creators are not altogether different. Their lusts and drives are also reflected in their work.
The final aspect of the show that intrigues me is the acting itself. Actors, acting like androids, acting human, but also at times acting robotic or anomalously. There are some scenes which seem to be altered with CGI, but others are simply outrageous performances in which real actors are showing us what it looks like when our thinking processes are interrupted by existential crises. In fact, it is a performance of metal illness, maybe a stroke crossed with a dissociative episode. A "glitch" in our human continuum.
The end of the second episode shows Delores, who after being asked if she would ever harm a living thing answered that she would never "harm a fly," is shown swatting and smashing a fly that has landed on her neck. She has begun a process of evolution which looks like it includes self-defense.
These characters and their frightening unexpected autonomy! Since Frankenstein's monster I've been fascinated with the pursuit of replication, as an aside or alternative to reproduction. We shall see, if the inhabitants of Westworld come crashing through reality with the same violence.
