Eliyahu Keller
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Virtually, Actually, Accidently, Human: Westworld and the Problem of the Real
The assimilation of the term ‘robot’ into our daily life was carried and is still sustained more so by an array of fictional imaginations than actual robots. These narratives—at times scientifically grounded, at others radically implausible—do more than imaginatively depict a complicated future of human-robot interactions. Rather, both representations of the present and projections of the future, they are historical evidences of the time of their creation and of the anxieties that stand behind their writing; they both depict the technological, ethical and cultural limits of the world from which they stem, and condition the terms of world which they construct.
This paper aims to investigate one such contemporary fiction—the 2016 HBO series Westworld—and suggest the inherent complication that such fictions present to the future of human-robot interaction. Building up on the reformulation of the binary opposition between the concepts of ‘virtual,’ ‘actual,’ and ‘possible’ as suggested by Henri Bergson and later Gilles Deleuze, this paper examines Westworld as a virtual reality. Defining, via Deleuze, the virtual as “part of the real object,” the paper focuses on the representations of actual and virtual humans, and their physical and conceptual interaction. Analogizing the shell-like reality of the park’s man-made environment, with the artificial bodies of its inhabitants, the paper claims the ‘indigenous’ inhabitants of Westworld to be more than mere technological tools. Rather, they exposed, through a potential power held within them, the reality of contemporary human existence. In Westworld robots and humans are not conceived as mutually exclusive or dependent counterpart, but as representing the amalgamated conditions of an existence that consistently fluctuates between the idea of a natural human and an artificial, virtual replica, made in nature’s image. As theoretical and historical representations of our multilayered and technological reality, they are evidence of the complexities of the human condition at the dawn of the 21st century.