This article was published in the "Sanlian Life Weekly" No. 18, 2020, the original title of the original article "< The Science Fiction Clue of the Westworld >", it is strictly forbidden to reprint it privately, and infringement must be investigated
From a science fiction perspective, Westworld discusses three important and fundamental science fiction themes over three seasons.
Chief Writer / Miao Qian
Stills from the American drama "Westworld"
If you're just drawn to the intense gunfights and fights, the beautiful set-up, or the futuristic shots of the popular American drama "Westworld," rather than caring specifically about the characters and plot, there's nothing to admit. It must be said that after watching nearly three seasons of "Westworld", I often feel confused about the complicated clues in the show, the background story of each person, and the different plans and demands between the "host" and the real human being, and finally can only run down the plot.
It must be lamented that the evolutionary ability of American dramas is very strong. In the past few years, classic American dramas have emerged in an endless stream, from realism to magic and science fiction themes, American dramas have exceeded the original limitations of TV dramas from all levels and reached a new height. From the magical theme of "Game of Thrones" constructed from money, politics, blood and magic, to the science fiction script "Westworld", which can be shaped and edited at will, and is equally full of intrigue and killing, what remains unchanged is people's vivid imagination of "other worlds". No wonder many people see Game of Thrones and Westworld as the same type of series, and see the latter as a successor to the former.
In the United Kingdom, the United States and other countries, the current boundary between "magic" and "science fiction" is indeed very blurred. In the "sci-fi" area of any bookstore in London or New York, readers can often find works by science fiction masters such as Philip Dick and Arthur Clarke, as well as magical stories such as Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings.
In the context of the gradual integration of science fiction and magic, and the increasingly meticulous and sophisticated production of American dramas, it is not difficult for science fiction fans to find that in "Westworld", there is a rare "hard science fiction" color in recent years. It is conceivable that in the writing team of "Westworld", there are not only the people who shape each character, designing a good story for the development of the character and the direction of the entire plot, but also people who are familiar with science and science fiction, who need to use the entire series to discuss some real problems on top of the characters and plot.
It all started with the "Turing test"
The first season of "Westworld" invited Anthony Hopkins, an old British drama bone, to sit and control the entire "Westworld" high-tech theme park. In this paradise, humans can do whatever they want in a world of bionic humans that cannot be distinguished by the naked eye – and behind the scenes, visitors, bionics and owners of the park all have their own plans, and a big drama unfolds.
In fact, designing robots, or bionic humans, to look like humans is not a novel idea in science fiction works. From the cyberpunk masterpiece "Will Bionic People Dream of Electronic Sheep?" To the popular science fiction movie "Ex Machina" a few years ago, this idea has become one of the fixed routines of science fiction works. From this point of view, although the opening chapter of "Westworld" looks futuristic, from a science fiction point of view, it is down-to-earth from the beginning of a science fiction genre, so that all the settings are self-contained, ready to discuss real problems in a down-to-earth manner.
The so-called "real problem" is the "Turing Test" that has plagued artificial intelligence researchers for decades and at the same time brought endless inspiration to science fiction writers. The test, named after Alan Turing, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, comes from Turing's own idea: through communication in the form of a computer keyboard or screen, if a machine exhibits a level of intelligence that makes it impossible to distinguish its identity (machine or person), it means that the machine passes the Turing test.
In May 1950, the first generation of British electronic computers, the Pilot ACE, ran the first program, a pre-selection scheme for the Turing-designed ACE
The Turing test has been proposed for 70 years. Although human computer technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past 70 years, no machine has been able to pass the Turing test. Against this backdrop of repeated defeats, some computer and AI research experts have turned to the Turing test. Many people believe that computers and humans process information in a completely different way, and that humans study computers, networks, artificial intelligence and other technologies in order to make them serve humans, so there is no need for computers to blindly imitate humans. Such a view certainly makes sense, but it also illustrates what makes human consciousness unique.
At the beginning of the story of the first season of "Westworld", the "setting" in the play is that the bionic humans developed by humans have passed the Turing test and reached the level of fake reality. What kind of impact will this have on humanity? Bionic humans, who are ostensibly indistinguishable from human speech and behavior, manipulate their behavior in fact line after line of instruction code. Are these instructions really enough to describe the whole of a person? This is the real clue hidden in the overall plot development of the first season.
With the current understanding of human beings about themselves, of course, there will be no clear answer to this question, and it has become the best stage for science fiction writers and screenwriters to use their imaginations. Human behavior is extremely unpredictable, and although the process of human thinking has a rational component, it is greatly disturbed by emotions and other unknown factors, making each person present a unique side. Human beings have not been able to deeply understand the way their brains work, and therefore cannot understand the so-called "inspiration" and "intuition" and other unique human feelings that cannot be explained by reason.
During the operation of the code, some unprogrammed behaviors in the Bionic People in Westworld appear, that is, the Bionic People eventually "live". By blindly imitating humans, they finally have a unique sense of self. At this time, for those "tourists" who once brought them painful memories, the awakened bionic people began to take revenge. Therefore, the play repeatedly quotes the famous sentence from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: "This cruel pleasure will end with brutality." Cruelty is the first lesson that bionic humans learn from humans.
Is human consciousness unique?
In the second season, Anthony Hopkins fades out, and a black-clad character named "William" gradually enters the main line of the story, which is a real person.
The timing of the second season is unclear. William is sometimes gentle, sometimes brutal, sometimes sober, sometimes confused, he has spent most of his life in Westworld, he is deeply in love with one of the beautiful bionic people, one of the heroines, Dolores, he is also convinced that the most important meaning of his life is hidden in this paradise. It can be said that all the pain and confusion that William felt formed the theme of the second season of Westworld - is human consciousness unique?
Westworld should only be a paradise, a place where real humans come to vent their indulgence, but they must not be taken seriously. Echoing the saying, "Seriously you will lose." William developed a true affection for the bionic dolores and trapped him in this paradise for the rest of his life. So, does it really matter that the object of a person's love is a real person, or a bionic person who is dominated by code? From the Turing test to exploring the uniqueness of human consciousness, The Second Season of Westworld can be seen as a continuation of the issues discussed in the first season.
The so-called "fake is true when it is true". If human consciousness is not unique, but can be simulated, copied, and even made in all sorts of ways, as Westworld demonstrates, then the first thing that should be questioned is the authenticity of human beings themselves. When the mystery of human consciousness, which is the deepest and most mysterious, is solved, then human uniqueness is also disintegrated. Bionic humans have the same form of consciousness as humans and can communicate with humans, but their forms of life are very different from humans.
We may as well accept such a setting in the play first, and see what kind of plot can be generated from this. Possessing a human form of consciousness, but not being bound by the same human as humans, the bionic man became a more advanced form of life. Their body parts can be replaced at any time, and their memories can be edited and altered without being bound by death. Death and rebirth are as simple as turning off and turning on a computer for a bionic person. Such a life form is far superior to that of human beings who have undergone millions of years of evolution, whose bodies are full of defects and who live in the shadow of death all the time. Humans originally wanted to design a plaything for themselves, but they did not expect to design a higher life form that could completely replace themselves. That's what Westworld came to after all sorts of sci-fi settings.
The question is, starting with the Turing test, our thinking about the nature of consciousness seems to go around in a circle and return to the same place: does the form of consciousness have to be consistent with that of humans? If a more advanced life appeared on Earth, would he necessarily be able to communicate with humans? Does a higher life have to take the place of man? For example, the complex and huge computer network that human beings are currently building, can we say that this network also has some kind of "consciousness", or even that it has life? I am afraid that even "Westworld" cannot answer such a question. At the end of the day, science fiction is derived from science. It is the limitations of humanity's current understanding of consciousness and the nature of life that limit our imagination and force science fiction to go around in a circle and return to the same place.
Belongs to the quantum computing of the future
Entering the third season, everything is peaking and turning. Several bionic humans in Westworld Break through the wall and enter the real human world, and the two life forms begin a head-on conflict. The two sides of the confrontation have been arranged: on one side is the heroine, the bionic dolores, and on the side from the human is a new character, Serac. The two sides are at odds, and they must cut the opponent's grass and root out the roots. As for who will be able to achieve the final victory, the current plot is unclear.
From the perspective of plot development, entering the third season, the audience is already familiar with the characters and scenes. The series seems to be inevitably entering the common clichés of American dramas such as super corporations and huge conspiracies. But from a science fiction perspective, the opposite is true. From the beginning of the third season, Westworld decisively abandoned the exploration of the nature and uniqueness of human consciousness that was at the heart of the first two seasons, and instead began to explore another new science fiction theme.
Hidden behind the two main characters, Dolores and Selak, is the real protagonist "Rehoboam" in the third season. In the episode, it's a god-like, all-knowing, all-powerful machine that can predict the future of everyone in the world. Mastering this machine is equivalent to having an all-knowing and all-powerful god perspective, and the whole world has no secrets to speak of. By building models, Rehoboam calculates everything that is about to happen in the world and foresees the fate of everyone. Only with such a powerful machine can humans fight powerful bionic humans.
Such magical machines that can predict the future certainly do not exist. The question is, the audience inevitably wonders, in theory, is it possible for humans to create such a magical machine that can predict the future? This involves simulating the real world through computational models. The computers currently used by humans are based on digital circuits, which convert the input data into a series of "0s" and "1s" for calculations. With the development of electronic technology, the speed of computer computing has been improving. But trees can grow taller and never reach the sky, and at the level of human computers, even in the foreseeable future, they are far from reaching the level that can simulate the whole world and predict the future.
Realizing such a dream is not entirely impossible in theory, which requires the use of new computational methods to carry out revolutionary quantum computing. The working principle of quantum computers is fundamentally different from the electronic computers currently used by humans, which use "quantum gates" for computation, which can process "0" and "1" data at the same time, and its computing speed is far from being comparable to that of traditional computers.
In October 2019, the journal Nature reported that Google scientists had made major breakthroughs in quantum computing research in the lab, achieving "Quantum Supremacy." The meaning of this somewhat grotesque word is that quantum computing has a superiority that traditional computing methods simply cannot match. This "Sycamore" quantum processor completes a series of randomly selected instructions in 200 seconds. Scientists at Google claim that for traditional computers to accomplish such a task, even the fastest supercomputer in humanity will take 10,000 years.
Reading such a report, some readers may think that the realization of quantum computing is just around the corner, and human beings are about to enter the magical future world. In fact, at present, human research on quantum computing is still in its infancy, and the Sycamore quantum processor only has a demonstration function, and like other quantum processors, it does not have the ability to actually work. Although quantum computing can be achieved in theory, in practice, it is necessary to overcome many difficulties to build such a magical machine. The real realization of quantum computing by humans may be in the distant future. And a quantum computer like the one shown in Westworld that can predict the future and operate faster than time will probably only exist in the imagination.
From a science fiction perspective, westworld discusses three important and fundamental science fiction themes in three seasons, with the plot line uninterrupted and the main characters not changing. This is the fundamental reason for the success of this American drama science fiction blockbuster that constantly brings visual impact to the audience. On the other hand, I am more concerned about whether the screenwriters can once again expand their imaginations and find a new science fiction theme worth exploring at a moment when they have cultivated a large fixed audience, but the plot has begun to inevitably become vulgar, and let such a theme become an important factor in the development of the plot, so that "Westworld" can get rid of the fate of the rotten end and become another classic in the minds of science fiction fans.