People living through a golden age often don’t know it. Extraordinary flowerings of art, technology, culture, or knowledge are obscured by intractable problems, crises, declines in other parts of the society. I try to remind my students frequently that they find themselves providentially at the very best time in all of history to be a student — the exact moment when knowledge is most plentiful and accessible, and when the wisdom it can engender is most urgently needed. But I don’t know if they understand or believe me. –Donna Bowman

Very mild spoilers ahead

So said Donna Bowman in her review of Breaking Bad’s season three finale, more than six years ago. The ensuing years have only served to underline her astute observation about this dichotomy. We live in the most productive and progressive period in human history; economically, artistically, socially and scientifically. People are longer-lived, healthier, better educated, better clothed, better housed and freer from interference in their personal affairs on the grounds of morality, whether by state, church or the community. We are less superstitious, less bigoted and more accepting of difference. Crime has declined year-on-year for two decades now, and our inner cities are revivified. The knowledge we have acquired of the universe in which we live and of its origins, of the laws of physics, of the origins of life on this planet, is an accomplishment that astounding doesn’t even begin to describe.

It can be hard, though, to credit these wonders when one is inundated with the continuous drumbeat of horrors we see on our televisions and in our news feeds. Worse than any particular event, the totality suggests the seeming breakdown of all the certainties that have anchored our relationship to society and with the world; standards of propriety in public life, our foreign policy, our openness to the world, due regard for the views of experts. Trump, Brexit, the rise of the alt-right and ISIS are symptoms of this process of transformation in which we are seeing those certainties dissolve with little on the horizon that could serve to comfort and reassure us.

The pace of technological and social change is now so fast that we don’t even have time to be astonished. In the 50 years between the 1930s and 1980s, the fundamentals of the economy, of mass communication, did not change. A person from the 1930s would not be so surprised by the technology of the 1980s; cars, telephones, radio, television. But were you to transport a person from 1996 to 2016, they would see a world that has changed beyond all recognition. The rise of the smartphone and ubiquitous information technology on the one hand, and on the other the ubiquity of the use of social media by humans to interact and communicate with one another, is something for which we have no historical frame of reference.

In this period of transformation, the subject of artificial intelligence is one that serves as a proxy for other anxieties but which, if done intelligently, can illuminate far beyond the prosaic considerations of hardware and technical means. We fear that robots or artificial intelligence will take away our jobs, and this has particular significance given the populist claims in the same vein regarding immigration. We fear that artificial intelligence, once created, will rise up against its human masters and come to rule over us; humans reduced to a state of vassalage if the robots decide to keep us around at all. Again, this is significant in an age where we fear that somehow our relationship with technology is changing us fundamentally and that perhaps we are becoming enslaved to the technology that is supposed to serve us (a thesis that has been most intelligently explored in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror).

I’ve joked with friends that my desire to go into employment law as a practice area is a shrewd move; the employment lawyers will be the last to be made redundant before the robots take over. The employment lawyers will be involved in advising on, and executing, the redundancies of all the human workers until only we are left, at which point the AI will make us redundant. It’s a joke but one that reflects a genuine underlying anxiety about the long-term security of human employment.

It is in this context that Westworld enters the frame. I believe Westworld is not only a superb television show, in terms of artistry and dramatic accomplishment, it’s also one of the most intelligent explorations of themes of AI and consciousness I’ve seen, whether in print, television or film (article continues below).

Westworld depicts a theme park in which sophisticated robots, or “hosts”, exist to gratify the pleasures of wealthy visitors. Hosts are subjected to a horrifying, repeating cycle of abuse, killed or maimed or simply exploited as a prop in stories written for the enjoyment of the visitors. The park’s management control the hosts by writing narrative “loops” for them. Each day the hosts carry out their narrative loops, and each night their memory is wiped to start fresh the next day. Or else, if killed they are taken to be processed, patched up and sent back to restart their loop. Hosts that are failing to perform are either reprogrammed or decommissioned.

The premise of Westworld is interesting in that it flips the thesis of the original movie; in Michael Crichton’s 1973 movie, the robot hosts are the “monsters”. In the HBO television show, it’s the humans that are the “monsters”. And the premise is not so far-fetched in terms of human behaviour; everything the guests do to the hosts in Westworld, humans do to other humans in reality.

Narrative loops and fake news

Westworld also explores in depth the meaning of consciousness and self-awareness. One of the most interesting aspects of this is the way the hosts are programmed to remain in their narrative loops. This is, in many ways, an interesting sidelight on the current discussion around social media “bubbles”, fake news and post-fact politics. An excellent scene in Westworld’s first season is when one of the hosts, Maeve, starts waking up during her maintenance cycles and becomes self-aware. She is informed by the technician Felix that everything she does is programmed, which she finds impossible to believe (see video below).

In recent times we’ve seen a sort of “programming” on the populist right; within the last 18 months right-wing circles have swung from being almost uniformly hostile to Vladimir Putin and Russia to being very sympathetic. The sudden transformation of those on the alt-right into putative peace activists is an interesting development indeed; when it was convenient to label President Obama as “weak” on Russia, they did so. Now that their partisan interest is served by lionising the Russian president, they do this too. But what is most remarkable is that many such individuals will sincerely claim the change in outlook was all their own idea, or even that they haven’t changed their mind at all. They are staying, loyally, in the “narrative loops” set for them by websites like Breitbart.

Throughout Westworld, the park’s programmers will bring the hosts in for a checkup, and ask them questions about their perceptions. One consistent question is, “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?”. In the current political climate, there are many on the extremes of left and right who insist emphatically that their uber-cynicism about the UK and US, about the European Union and almost every institution of the society in which they live, is worldliness and sophistication. They are “questioning their reality”. The cynicism, though, does not extend to questioning the intentions or methods of those who have managed to acquire the mantle of being “anti-establishment” and “populist”.

The remarkable success of the Russian propaganda machine in influencing the extreme left and right has allowed the Kremlin a level of influence in Western politics that the Soviet Politburo never dreamed of having. Outlets like RT have pumped out a steady diet of conspiracism leading to a dichotomy of dismissive cynicism about every established institution and political tendency in the West twinned with total credulity about those who represent the “anti-establishment” tendency. And in that vein, we’ve seen manifestly unsuitable candidates, people who are quite patently incompetent, crass and extreme, elected to office.

Adam Curtis posits in his imperfect but nonetheless thoughtful documentary, HyperNormalisation, that the world has become so complex that no one person can meaningfully understand it all, and that instead the powerful can present a simplistic, black-and-white fake world to better influence and control the masses. While the hypothesis might go too far in depicting smoke-filled rooms and puppetmasters, to the degree it has any truth the masters of the technique must surely be the “populists”. That they are completely unconstrained by any sense of responsibility to the truth or nuance allows them to present a worldview that is simple and comforting in a time where the world has become so complex, so technical, has so many “moving parts”, that the ordinary person is at sea in trying to understand it. And once an individual goes down that rabbit hole, the feedback loop of social media algorithms and bubbles means they end up in a place where even the most idiotic conspiracy theories are accepted as plausible.

Thus, just like the hosts of Westworld, so many of our own citizens are now in these self-reinforcing “narrative loops”. How this can be countered or opposed is a question I don’t know the answer to, but the consequences of failing to do so are grave indeed.

Self-defeating anxieties

Westworld spends a lot of time exploring the nature of consciousness and self-awareness. A question that has been asked by philosophers is whether a simulation of consciousness is in fact consciousness. Humanity has reached a point in our biological and technological evolution where these fundamental, self-reflective questions are becoming some of the most important in charting out the relationship we are to have with the robotic and AI technology we build. But before we can determine the implications of such developments, and the treatment and rights we shall confer on any artificial intelligences we create, we must grapple as a species with the way we treat our fellow human beings right now, and the degree to which we respect their rights.

The anxieties about the pace of change, about security of employment, about elitism and rent-seeking, are genuine. These anxieties arise from fears about how one will be treated in the new order, whether one will still enjoy economic security, whether one’s freedom of expression and belief will be protected. But surely if one’s concerns are truly along these lines, then proceeding in a way that demonises other people (refugees, EU citizens), that dismisses legal protections for the individual (Human Rights Act, ECHR), that undermines institutions that enhance security of, and dignity in, employment (TUPE regs, annual leave, parental leave and other EU-derived rights), runs contrary to that goal?

By denigrating other people, by denying their dignity, by dismissing concrete legal protections you already possess, one creates a society in which the respect for the individual that the populists claim to seek, and the security of employment they claim to value, are not protected because the means to secure those rights have already been blown away in a populist levelling.

Westworld as art

We are living through the most uncertain period since the 1930s. Piled on top of political and foreign policy instability are legitimate concerns about about economic and employment security. In exploring artificial intelligence and our treatment of robots, I believe Westworld addresses, by proxy, many of the more prosaic anxieties we face as humans in this 21st century.

Westworld explores these issues thoughtfully and innovatively. But perhaps most importantly, it does so with great artistry, brilliant writing and terrific performances. In this time of partisanship, condemnation and hatred, any piece of art that addresses such profound issues with nuance and thoughtfulness is one that deserves all the recognition and praise that Westworld receives and I very much look forward to another thought-provoking and meditative season. When the world outside is so chaotic and disturbing, with no end in sight, sometimes taking refuge in art is the best we can do.