Westworld, a silver screen HBO remake of a novel and movie (1973) of the same name by Micheal Crichton draws on tropes that we as an audience are not unfamiliar with. Like Jurassic Park, arguably Crichton’s best known work, a controlled experiment open to human exploration and adventure lays the ground for what becomes a question of our ability to control and respond to changes in complex systems. It also serves as an embryonic space where the deepest fantasies of the ‘guests’, human visitors to the park, are given free reign within a controlled environment serviced by androids and consequently, free from the consequences which permeate the outside world. The literary origins of such an endeavor are hard to ignore, particularly when the subject which challenges our assumption of what we know and what we can do, are robots.
The great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, in his foundation series (1942-1993) postulated a fictional discipline called psychohistory. Drawing on reserves of knowledge regarding historical, psychological and statistical tendencies humans could broadly arrogate to know what the future may have in store for them. The notion of a controlled environment, where an experiment is fostered into an enterprise is precisely the trope that Crichton’s narratives play on. And yet this prelapsarian panacea, within the genre of action film or the psychological thriller reach their quilting point precisely when we witness a rupture in this blessed schema. In confronting the limits of statistical or probabilistic thinking however, what is yet fascinating and worth re-call is our apprehension of what it means for a tool, even one as sophisticated as a robot with a semblance of ‘artificial intelligence’ to go ‘off script’.
We see the programmers, functionaries who code the hosts in Westworld in a curious light. While they may be handling the behavioral outputs of machines they do so from a position somewhere between a parole officer and a parent. ‘Glitches’, that secret word for the unexpected in robotics are sieved through and unknotted by the programmers as they ask the robots to explain their actions and are able to sift through the conflicts experienced by a sentience that recurrently is subjected to the most horrific of traumas. This is the other side of what ‘controlled environments’ permit for, the indulgence of the ghastlier fantasies of humans, in a world apparently free of their repercussions. One of Westworld’s stronger suits is undoubtedly it’s portrayal of what this pain comes to mean for the hosts (the scripted role for the robots).
We see this in the ambiguous figure of Arnold/Bernard, who’s real identity (human or android) is a secret hidden in plain sight. He struggles with the loss of his son, Charlie. In speaking with his wife he mentions that the pain of his loss is all that he has left of him, an attachment to a memory. We witness this unfold in the roles we are sure are the host’s as well, when Maeve Millay, a madam at the popular whore house begs Robert Ford, the head programmer not to erase the memory of the Man in Black’s murder of her daughter. It is here, in the nexus of such anguishes that we witness how bold the conceptual vision of the narrative dares to be as it reaches for what may be the nature of memory itself. Reveries, a class of gestures introduced as part of a routine update facilitate access to memories from prior scripted roles which may have been purged within the hosts’ mind. These memories are not directly available to the hosts but can be accessed by the reverie gesture class before the storage space assigned to the memory is overwritten. The truly difficult question that Westworld skirts the peripheries of is what does it mean to be conscious, and we confront this most poignantly in the fundamental distinction between the guests (visitors to the park) and the hosts (programmed AI).
In any transaction, when one party has better or more information than the other, there emerges an imbalance of decision making power that can perversely effect the contract between parties, leading to a market failure of sorts, insider trading being an example. Joesph Stiglitz, a nobel prize winning economist calls this ‘informational asymmetry’. The guests ‘know’ that Westworld is a game, a place for their amusement, more than partially severed from any ghastly permanent consequences, allowing them to forget even their human mortality as they exercise about as much restraint as a hormonal teenager playing Red Dead Redemption. In contrast, the hosts, who – in a sense are immortal, know of no other world beyond the confines of the amusement park they believe to be the horizon of their lives.
In a rare paternalistic moment, the Man in Black (Ed Harris) tries to explain this to Teddy Flood (James Mardsen), enchanted in the romantic quest to save Dolores. “You’re here to loose, the game is rigged and the house always wins”. Beyond ‘the game’ however, there is something happening which mortality can’t quite come to terms with, a sliver of experience that is the host’s alone. Death in it’s eternal multiplicity is bourn by them as they repeatedly stand mutilated by brutal visitors, perhaps none more so than Dolores herself who is the oldest AI in the park. The material remainder that this leaves behind in them, in the form of a bullet wound in Maeve’s abdomen sewn over without proper extraction is the key to her ‘awakening’, as she learns what we dare hope not to, the inconsequentiality of death.
The narratorial unconscious of Westworld is alive to the implications which follow and the implied impermissibility of such a domain, for a guest is what fuels the Man in Black’s bloody search for ‘Arnold’s game’, the deeper game within the maze which has real stakes, real consequences. We are hence introduced to the mysterious figure who was once Robert Ford’s partner, yet who could not rest content with merely the semblance of consciousness, he wanted the real thing. And to safeguard his illicit treasure, he went as far as to ‘program’ Dolores to kill him in an attempt to never have the park open to guests.
Protectionism is, I suppose an impulse only human. The quote ‘If goods do not cross borders, soldiers will’ is commonly attributed to Fredric Bastiat, a 19th century French liberal economist and we witness what he may have meant in spirit, for while Westworld exports, perhaps nothing, memories, attachments – what it draws are hordes of ‘guests’ in for the bloody time of their lives. This failure of Arnolds dearest dream, his death wish, to safeguard the host’s he created is truly moving. As the finale culminates in Dolores’ journey to true consciousness, her realization that the voices and visions of Arnold that she witnesses are in fact, her conversation with her own mind, unlocks the maze which the Man in Black sought and which Robert Ford secretly worked towards after his partner, Arnold’s death.
Real freedom, in the hands of an entity either inhuman or more than human – depending on how your sympathies lie. Before Robert leaves for his final address he shows Dolores the center of a famous painting on the Sistine Chapel, of god reaching across to touch Adam. He explains to her that the nebula in the background from which he reaches from is shaped like the human brain, closetly implying that the wonders of divinity originate in all too human origins. Michealangelo, the artist once said that ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.’ By this light, Arnold’s failure was truly magnificent.
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