Watching the reruns of Westworld has confirmed my opinion that it’s the most intelligent television series ever made. The questions it poses, about the nature of sentient life and the point at which machine and human intelligence become indistinguishable, have been considered many times before. The best examples are probably Blade Runner and Alex Garland’s equally brilliant Ex Machina. Both morally and practically, those questions are complex and fascinating (rather like Westworld): but what lights my fire is not so much how we might one day treat androids, as the implications for our own evolution.
My limited understanding of the evolution of species leads me to believe that it mostly happens in relatively sudden bursts, with slower and more incremental changes in between. Those bursts probably have external causes (e.g. changes in the environment) rather than just the random mutations that drive a lot of the lesser advances.
In Westworld, the minds of the artificial humans start to develop independently of any human intervention. The original cause is a mix of meddling by their creators and some unforeseen malfunctions but their progress becomes self-driven. I’m not sure that this possibility has ever before been presented as such a dynamic evolutionary process. These are not really androids but a hybrid species whose minds, entirely human in origin, evolve quickly through the interplay between their own logic and some natural processes that are beyond their or anyone else’s control.
Bearing in mind that these Westworld “hosts” are reflections of us, this raises some really interesting questions about how our own human intelligence will evolve as a result of interacting with and attempting to manage artificial intelligences that are rapidly becoming greater than our own.
If ever there was a likely external cause for mankind’s next evolutionary leap, surely this is it. Will we merge with AI to create true hybrids (something that is already starting to happen)? Will we compete with AI, stimulating our own mental abilities in an effort to keep pace with the genie that we have let out of the bottle? Above all, will we come to understand the parts of our thinking that are free will, versus those that are pre-programmed, bio-chemical processes? This is the essence of the struggle that the Westworld characters go through and it lies at the core of our own existential questioning.
I can’t wait to see what the inspired script writers Nolan and Joy make of these issues in Season 3. They wound up the last season by having some key Westworld characters escape into the outside world, so they’re pretty much bound to address them. Meanwhile I’m working on related issues in my new novel, After the Event, where an alien intelligence is infecting humanity rather like a virus, upgrading us despite our best efforts to stay dumb and primitive. It’s spooky but convenient that COVID-19 is happening at the same time, providing a real-world model of how humanity tries frantically to contain the uncontrollable.
In giving birth to AI, we have done more than to create the next great leap forward in science and technology. We have produced a baby Titan that may well evolve into the next version of humanity. I can’t help thinking that it will have to be a big improvement on Homo Sapiens v1.0, if we are to survive.
Alan Brunstrom, Author Site 