Now here’s a series I haven’t been able to recap for you guys. HBO original series Westworld takes place in a high-tech, Western-themed amusement park of the same name. This isn’t a typical amusement park with just some roller coasters and rides, no. Westworld allows patrons to roleplay to the extreme, doing whatever they see fit in a simulated Wild West town, with any of the android “Hosts” that populate the area… no matter how perverse.
Spoiler Alert: Fair warning. This isn’t going to be a full review, but I will be discussing a few plot devices.
Westworld raises questions about “humanity”
Back in the year 2000, the company Maxis released The Sims, which revolutionized the gaming industry by introducing the most realistic “sandbox” environment of its time. You could create a virtual self, have a virtual home, family, job… essentially do what you want within the limits of the game. A year later, another sandbox game — Grand Theft Auto III — expanded on the freedom players had in a video game by literally giving them the power to commit crimes. Note that while GTA3 required players to simulate a lot of “criminal activity” in order to progress through the story, the game did not expressly tell players to rob and murder everyone in their path. And yet GTA3 is most memorable simply because when players were given the power, that is exactly what most did.
Frighteningly similar to the freedom guests have in Westworld. The plot shows us a subtle divide between the guests. William (Jimmi Simpson) for example, initially finds the way guests treat the android hosts as appalling. On the other hand the Man in Black (Ed Harris) has no qualms about rape and murder as he believes the androids aren’t even human.
But what exactly makes a being human? What makes up humanity?
Westworld’s “Immersive” environment
These days, where each AI character in your favorite games have unique appearances and personalities, it’s much harder to take a sword and go on a rampage than it was in the days of GTA3. In games, TV shows, books, and stage plays, this is called “immersion.” The carrying over of emotions and experience into a virtual world.
Immersion is a big part of any entertainment system. The most popular example is the game Skyrim, where independent programmers called “modders” have worked on immersion to such lengths that there are now over 50,000 different downloads designed to make the game as real or surreal as players wish. The variety is astounding as well, ranging from enhanced visuals such as realistic weather, rocks, or streams, to gameplay-changing mods such as the addition of realistic needs and diseases.
However, no matter how advanced graphics become, video games will never exist in the physical plane we inhabit, and that will always be the least immersive thing about them. In Westworld however, it’s a whole different story. You pull a trigger, and something dies by your hand. You rent a horse, and you actually ride a horse instead of sitting at a keyboard while an avatar does so. You can’t get more immersive than that. When you have a drink with a Westworld host, you do so with a self-aware entity that looks, sounds, and feels human… except that it isn’t.
Are Westworld hosts alive?
Biology would tell us no. As far as we know, a host is not made of organic material. It has no capacity to grow or reproduce without intervention of its manufacturers. And yet the show fools us into feeling for these artificial beings. Is it instinct? Preservation of the species? Are we just hardwired to care for beings that are in any way similar to humans? How close to being human are the hosts anyway?
The hosts’ reactions are programmed to simulate reality to the best the programmers can achieve. But in a sense, is that any different from how the human mind works? Our personalities — our souls — are unique patterns of information, partially programmed by our genetic template, partially acquired from outside factors as we go through life, and partially determined by ourselves. Our thoughts are a series of coded electrical signals in the brain, far more complex than any AI circuitry can simulate thus far.
The question is: how complex is complex enough? The hosts are programmed, but they continuously record and save new information throughout their existence, as evidenced by the dreams of one particular host in episode 2 (Maeve Millay, played by Thandie Newton). And they are very much capable of making their own decisions that go against their programming, as shown by Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) when she kills a fly without a second thought.
When does coded information become advanced enough for us to qualify it as the beginning of a soul?
Westworld airs in the Philippines on HBO every Wednesday at 22:55PM