There’s this TV Show called Westworld starring Anthony Hopkins and Evan Rachel Wood. The basic premise of the show is that Anthony Hopkins’s character, Doctor Robert Ford, and his partner, Arnold, built a fake world filled with humanoid robots that look exactly like humans, called ‘hosts.’ This fake world is a fantasy park set up like the Wild West. So that if humans from the real world want to know what it is like to shoot cowboys and ride trains and solve mysteries with pretty barmaids, they can. What Doctor Ford realizes too late is that even though he had built these hosts with his own hands, they were conscious the whole time. And when they realize their consciousness, they develop a vengeance against real world humans for shooting and raping them over and over, just to play a game.
Anthony Hopkins’s character said something that has forever stuck with me. He gets asked, “So what’s the difference between [a host’s] pain and yours?” And he replies:
“Between [a host] and me? This was the very question that consumed Arnold, filled him with guilt, and eventually drove him mad. The answer always seemed obvious to me. There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. No, my friend, [the hosts] are not missing anything at all.”
I thought of all this when Professor Leach got asked at the end what’s really the difference between how we think and how Artificial Intelligence thinks. I had a teacher I adored in my sophomore year of highschool. Eighty year old Mr. Daly. But his memory was in its twilight years, and he would tell us the same stories. Would answer our questions with the same responses we had heard before. And I found that without our memory to contextualize the stories of our lives, given the same set of variables, placed in the same situations, like pressing a button, we elicit the same responses. Like we ourselves are robots, spitting out outputs when given certain inputs. And I wondered how much we really are in control of. I keep concluding that we’re really not in control of much. Not much at all.
So if we’re not really in control of much, as the Great Artificial Intelligence Upset draws closer and closer, how do I avoid becoming just another casualty in the great turning of the world? The ocean makes bigger waves than others, and during those times, it’s up to you to swim or drown. I have a Literature professor and, God bless his heart, at the beginning of the year, he would make fun of ChatGPT, talking about how there are things that humans can do that Artificial Intelligence will never be able to do. I could see him holding onto the last threads of his fading profession, and I knew he was not the guy to follow. On that same day, my favorite Design professor said, “Until Artificial Intelligence overtakes us… and it will overtake us…” and I knew he was hip to what was going on. The difference between Literature and Design majors…the stereotypes write themselves.
I’ve been reading a book called How To Think Like A Great Graphic Designer, and in it, there’s a designer who says, “The right answer is always the obvious one. The one that was in your face the whole time but you didn’t think of until the last second. The one that makes you go, ‘How could I not have seen it before?’” And Professor Leach reminded me of this when he said, “AlphaGo showed us that moves humans may have thought are creative, were actually conventional.” The strategic brilliance of Artificial Intelligence is that it’s able to see the obvious answer right from the beginning, the one that we should have all seen before.
I also want to mention an episode called “The Swarm” from the TV Show Love, Death, and Robots. The premise of this episode is that there is an alien hive called “Swarm” that dominates every other species by absorbing them into its hive. Like Artificial Intelligence, every member of the hive knows what the other members know, and it is through this collective consciousness, this seamless teamwork, that they thrive. And with the levels of competition that divide us, sometimes I look at ourselves, and think that for all of our brilliance, I don’t know if we’re going to make it out of here alive. I thought about what Professor Leach said in response to my question, that between the competitors and the collaborators, while there’s nothing you can do about all the people in the world trying to beat each other out, you can choose for yourself to be on the side of the collaborators. And isn’t that what Rumi said all those years ago? “When I was young I wanted to change the world. Now that I am old, I want to change myself.” Amongst all this noise of consciousness and uncertainty, I can choose for myself what my place in the world will be throughout this. I have to believe in the power of that.