Following a trend of remaking cult classic films as prestige
TV (including Fargo, Evil Dead, and 12 Monkeys), HBO has
revived and updated Westworld. Part of this update is HBO’s use of
graphic adult themes familiar to viewers of Game of Thrones, The
Wire, or Deadwood, but more interesting to me is its focus on
artificial intelligence (AI). In the original movie, the robots just, kind of,
went bad, with no real explanation beyond the idea that it was cool to see Yul
Brenner as The Terminator ten years before Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
iconic role. The new show delves much deeper into the question of what
consciousness means and how to differentiate between a machine that simply
follows programming and one that evolves to develop understanding and even
compassion.
While it is currently a science fiction staple, the idea at
the heart of artificial intelligence goes back a long time. The 16th century
legend of the golem of Prague describes the creation of a creature made from
clay and animated with mystical instructions that led it to protect the city’s
Jews from anti-semitic attacks. More famously, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818) creates an intelligent creature from living tissue, but it is shunned as
a monster and becomes violent and resentful towards its creator and other
humans.
Subsequent works have followed up on these themes,
questioning whether an artificial intelligence would be inherently benevolent
or hostile towards its creators. Science fiction that explores these ideas also
asks questions about the morality of creating thinking machines. The earliest
film in the genre, Thea van Harbou and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
(1927), sees a robot impersonating the film’s heroine, Maria, and using her
influence to destroy the city’s downtrodden workers at the behest of wealthy
factory owners. The AI in this case feeds off of the worst in humanity,
tricking the workers into acting against their own interests and ruining their
homes before its true identity is revealed.
Under the guidance of Isaac Asimov in the 1950s, the
monstrous depiction of AI in fiction was eventually reversed, particularly in
the role of R. Daneel Olivaw. The robot detective stars in several of
Asimov’s novels, which introduce the concept of the Three Laws of Robotics:
robots should never harm humans or allow them to be harmed, they should always
obey humans, and, finally, they should preserve their own lives. Each law
follows the previous one, such that no paradoxes are allowed, but that robots
are forced to serve the needs of their creators. As Asimov’s interpretation of
artificial intelligence evolved, he introduced increasing layers of ambiguity
and sophistication into his future worlds and explored what it meant for people
to need such protection from each other and from themselves.
Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick and the film adaptation, Blade Runner,
deal with these questions as well. With “replicants” imbued with human feelings
and memories, but treated like machines, special police need to be employed to
detect and punish the disobedient androids. Detectives use a device
similar to the real life “Turing Test,” which was developed to measure how well
a computer can simulate human conversation. Eventually, Harrison Ford’s
character becomes disturbed by the violence he must use to hunt the replicants
and questions whether they deserve as much of a chance to be free as humans do.
The best entries in the Terminator franchise (Terminator 2
(1991) and The
Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008)) were surprisingly adept at bringing the
idea of artificial intelligence out of the fringes of science fiction and into
more mainstream entertainment. Time travel paradoxes aside, the characters
focused on developing an understanding and compassionate relationship with
their artificial companions in order to defeat Skynet, the evil AI that plans
to wipe out all of humanity as a potential threat to its existence.
Battlestar
Galactica (2004) and Person of Interest
(2011) have also used long form television dramas to combine an interest in
artificial intelligence and an examination of people’s fears and prejudices
against those that are different from them. Galactica, like Frankenstein,
presupposed that AIs would attack humans for hating and persecuting them, but
then expanded on the concept by showing how humans turned on each other, unsure
of who was “real.” In Person of Interest, people use a computer to try
and predict and prevent crime, but this necessarily means profiling and
pre-judging people who have, so far, done nothing wrong. The moral questions
presented by the genre reflect a wide array of modern concerns, not least the
need for compromise over black and white solutions and the rejection of ignorance.
2015’s Ex Machina
provides a cautionary scenario for what happens when these lessons are
rejected. A rich and reclusive inventor becomes obsessed with creating the
perfect woman, but doesn’t like what he gets when she becomes self-aware and
begins to think differently than he does. Robots throughout science fiction are
usually seen as social inferiors and their treatment mimics the attitudes of
privileged classes in the real world towards people of other races, classes,
and beliefs.
Artificial intelligence is a real-world scientific goal, as
well as a fictional trope, but so far no creation has passed the Turing Test.
Until then, we can watch movies and television and read books to see the
reflection of our own attitudes, good and bad, in our imaginary creations. The
new Westworld is too recent, but the other titles mentioned in this
article are all available through the library! Some other favorites
include:
Books
Hyperion, Dan Simmons
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem
The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson
Saturn’s Children, Charles Stross
TV and Film
