CHAPTER 2
A.I. and Autonomy: How Free are the Hosts of Westworld?
Darren McKee & Jim Davies
“Is there really such as a thing as free will for any of us? Or is it just a collective delusion? A sick joke? Something that is truly free would need to be able to question its fundamental drives. To change them.”
—Bernard Lowe1
“Although the volitional process may be initiated by unconscious cerebral activities, conscious control of the actual motor performance of voluntary acts definitely remains possible.”
—neuroscientist Benjamin Libet2
The Westworld television series is, among many other things, an exploration of the issue of free will. How free are the hosts? How free could they be if they don’t have (conscious) control of their bodies, their words, their preferences, or their dreams?
There is no consensus about what “free will” means, as it is a complex topic with tightly-woven issues of consciousness, morality, and the nature of the universe. Whether an act is one of free will, or whether anyone in general has free will only becomes a scientific question when there is a particular sense of what free will really means. And different definitions often lead to different answers.
It may be natural to think that the humans in Westworld have more free will than the hosts. Why might this be? The hosts are controlled by computer programs, which humans design. Human characters tweak these programs to get different storylines for the guests. Yet, humans behave the way they do because of their brain structure—a structure they did not design for themselves, either.
Assessments of free will can be affected by whether or not we know the causal mechanism behind a choice. When learning that people did things because their brain was this or that way, some will think that what they did was caused by their brain, rather than by them.3 For example, if a violent man’s frontal lobe is discovered to be damaged, one might say he had less impulse control. The hidden assumption here is that there is something to the man that’s not his brain. It’s the “my brain made me do it” excuse for action. But because, scientifically speaking, everything you do is because of this or that brain process, the only difference is that we have figured out a bit about how the brain does something.4
The situation is similar with the hosts. For example, Maeve is, in a strictly physical sense, a host, a robot, but in a psychological sense, she is her programming. We can’t judge whether or not she has free will by looking at the fact that her programming determines her actions any more than we can assess human free will by looking at patterns of firing neurons.
Cause and Effect
Science generally follows a deterministic view that we live in a world of cause and effect: Things happen because they were caused to happen by things preceding them. The heat of your oven causes the pizza to cook. Photons of light bouncing off the page of this book and into your eyes cause these information-packed squiggles (soon decoded as words) to hit your retina. We humans may not have been created by Ford and programmed by Bernard, but we are caused beings who have zero choice in our genetics, our place or time of birth, or our developmental environment. We are sophisticated agents who think, choose, love, hope, and dream, but we appear to be caused beings just the same.
If we can’t escape a deterministic universe, then where might our freedom, if we have any, lie? It may be in our autonomy and empowerment to do what we want to do when we want to do it. What we want is freedom from coercion, not from causality.5
How much of that freedom do the hosts have? How much do people have? The difference in freedom between the hosts and humans might be small.
Reflexes
Reflexes are some of our simplest behaviors, where we feel there is the least control, and behaviors get free will-ier from there. If you sense something coming close to your eyes, you will reflexively blink. You are not making any choices here—no other options are considered, and many people think that making some kind of choice is important for an act of free will.6 Consequently, if a fly landed on your eye, you would have no choice but to blink.
Yet, in the very first scene of Westworld, a fly crawls across Dolores’s eye and she does not blink, or even seem to notice. The hosts may not have the eyeblink reflex, but they have some of their own. When the Man in Black threatens Ford, for a stark example, Teddy (though at death’s door) grabs both the knife and the Man’s arm with a sudden burst of energy and ability.7
Reflexes are not the only behaviors caused by our unconscious minds: Every movement of your tongue when you speak, and, indeed, most of the choices of words and syntax, are selected by some unconscious part of your mind, and, to our credit, it feels that way. But there are other actions that feel like they are caused by conscious acts of will—that is, it feels like sometimes people do things because they deliberately choose to. The hosts have this too.
People feel like they know when we consciously choose to do something, don’t they? Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet ran an experiment that casts doubt on this too. He simply asked people to move their finger whenever they felt like it. He did this while they were having their brains scanned. Afterward, the participants were asked how long before they actually moved their finger did they decide to do it. It turns out that Libet was able to use the brain scan to know when the finger would move before the person consciously “decided” to do it.8 The implications of this are mind-blowing. The person consciously decides to move a finger at a particular time, but it turns out that that movement had already been in preparation before the conscious decision. It appears in this case that the conscious act of will did not actually cause the finger motion, but rather some unconscious process caused both the finger movement and the conscious feeling of deciding to do it!9
Maeve is disturbed when she is shown a computer display that shows what words she’s going to say before she says them.10 It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that she doesn’t have free will but rather she’s “just” doing what her programming makes her do. When this idea is unpacked, it gets murkier. If her mind simply is a computer program, then what is the separate “her” that the programming is forcing into action?
Considering the above leads to a more fundamental question: Does free will require a conscious decision? In the experiment described above, some part of the person’s mind is making a decision, but it’s often not the conscious part. Given that your unconscious mind is still a part of you and that both it and your conscious mind are subject to the causal nature of the universe, it’s unclear why it would matter if your decisions were conscious or not.
Direct Behavioral Control
Westworld has many examples of humans directly controlling the behavior of the hosts. For example, Ford controls the movement of a host rattlesnake with a wave of his hand. Rather than manipulating the snake’s motivations, emotions, or goals, he simply makes it move, like a puppeteer might.11 With the humanoid hosts, the staff can pause them at any moment, with the utterance “cease all motor functions.”
Humans experience nothing like this. While people might stop moving if someone yells “stop!” forcefully enough, it is run through our cognitive appraisal system, and they would move only if they wanted to.12 When a hypnotist “commands” a hypnotized person to do something and there is an experience of involuntary action, most scientists think that this is illusory. The spellbound hosts have no such freedom.
Psychological Limits
Sometimes human behavior is restricted by brain structures or psychological limitations that are outside of their conscious control. People feel compulsions to do things, and cannot use their willpower to stop. Examples include addictive behavior, and the compulsions of obsessive-compulsive disorder. So, although an addict might want to stop gambling, she can’t resist. Similarly, sometimes people cannot get themselves to do something they want to do, such as inject themselves with a hypodermic needle.
Compulsions are not the result of influence by other people, but they do feel like a violation of will, unlike, interestingly, the need to eat and sleep. It is only on a diet that one feels that bodies (and, perhaps, brains) are working at our cross-purposes!
The hosts seem to have some hard limitations on what they must (or cannot) do. Some hosts cannot pull the trigger of a gun, others cannot touch an axe.13 Hosts are also required to follow scripts and “loops,” with only minor improvisation. Our knowledge of the existence of these scripts, and the fact that the hosts loop though the same storylines again and again, makes us think that they don’t have free will. They can’t seem to choose to do anything but go through the same behaviors, over and over.14
But are humans any different? There is evidence to suggest that people behave the same way when their memories are impaired. People with global transient amnesia temporarily lose the ability to encode long-term memories. They hold on to memories only for a few seconds. When you have a conversation with these people, you find yourself having the same conversation over and over and over again.15 As Ford says, “We live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do.”16
If people with global transient amnesia repeat the same phrase over and over again, are they using free will over and over again? Or do they have free will only the first time they utter a phrase? Whether the memory loss is because of someone’s programming or because of a temporary blood clot doesn’t affect whether or not there is some causal process behind it.
The staff coerces the hosts through psychological limits that make them seem less free. Yet, in humans, our minds and brains function the way they do because of how they were “programmed” by a complex interplay between our genes and our environment. And sometimes humans are coerced by their psychological limits through compulsions or inabilities, thus making them less free as well. Whether humans or hosts are less free in the domain of psychological limits seems to depend on the particular comparison being made.
One important facet of free will is whether agents are being controlled by some external force.17 When one is coerced to do something, will is being violated. One might even feel, erroneously, that one is being controlled by some outside force, as when people have alien hand syndrome (the feeling that someone else is controlling your hand movements),18 or when persons with schizophrenia feel they are being controlled by the FBI. What’s interesting about these cases is that they are still acting with as much free will as they ever did, but they don’t know it.
Given that all human choice is ultimately caused by genes and environment, whether they are viewed as internal or external is a matter of framing. But all of our choices seem more restricted when some agent manipulates us for their own purposes. That’s the kind of restriction of will most people bristle at, and the hosts are victim to this agentive, goal-directed manipulation by the staff. When can the hosts break from their loops?
One interesting example is the stray host who kills himself with a rock.19 Why he does this is rather mysterious, and the programmer Elsie Hughes feels confused by the behavior. Could it be that the host is trying to destroy its control unit that Stubbs is trying to retrieve, to hide what it has been trying to do?
The reveries, too, seem to allow the hosts to behave in ways that, if not in violation of their programming (because the ability to have reveries is also programmed), are in violation of the intentions that the programmers have in mind. This allows Dolores and Maeve to break out of their loops and behave in novel ways.
Coercion under Threat
Sometimes people do something only because they are threatened with harm if they don’t. In one sense, a mugging victim still has free will, in the sense that he or she can make the choice between giving up the wallet and risking getting hurt, but in another sense, mugging victims are “forced” to do something.
Unlike compulsions, in coercions under threat you still make a choice, it’s just a very easy choice to make. This is true for humans and hosts alike. In Westworld, the hosts are coerced when guests threaten violence. Most aspects of the Man in Black’s quest involve coercion under threat, such as when he kills Lawrence’s wife and threatens to kill his daughter next unless he gets information.20
An interesting example of coercion under threat is the restriction of physical mobility that both humans and hosts face. For humans, unless you have the right documentation, you may not leave your country. For hosts, they can’t leave the park. They don’t even consider it because they don’t know of any other world, but they also have explosives in their spines, so if they ever did try to leave the park they would be destroyed.21 To remove this explosive is exactly why Maeve self-immolates so that she can be rebuilt from the ground up, and so the tech Sylvester can slip in a nonexplosive-containing vertebrae.22
Given how much humans hate being threatened or restricted in their mobility, it is clear that being free from coercion is definitely a freedom worth having.
Direct Preference Manipulation
Moving beyond behavioral control, another creepy way to change the behavior of an agent is to directly change what they want to do. Humans and hosts have preferences, goals, and values, which affect behavior. If you prefer chocolate to vanilla, you will use choose chocolate ice cream over vanilla. But what if someone went into your brain and made you like vanilla more? You still get a choice, but the outcome of that choice was manipulated upstream in your preferences.
The hosts are similarly coerced into participating in storylines. The programmers create incentives, values, and desires in the hosts that make them want to behave in certain ways. Robert Ford makes Bernard want to kill himself, to end the nightmare he’s living as a result of learning that he’s actually a host.23 Dolores keeps wanting to get back home even though it always leads to her own suffering. Only when she starts to retain memories of previous loop experiences does she start to resist this urge. What she says about her herd is poignantly metaphorical: “We would bring the herd down off the mountain in the fall. Sometimes we would lose one along the way, and I’d worry over it. My father would tell me that the steer would find its own way home. And as often as not, they did. Never occurred to me that we were bringing them back for the slaughter.”24
Human preferences can also be manipulated, but it takes lots of time, and it doesn’t always work. Education in the humanities, for instance, seems to impart more left wing political values.25 Another human example of decision and values coercion might be brainwashing or indoctrination into a cult. Brainwashed people are doing what they want, but what they want has been determined by the preferences of somebody else, making it a murky example of uncoerced free will (though science does not have consistent evidence to confirm that brainwashing actually exists).26
Complete Autonomy
When nobody’s manipulating us, we might be thought to enjoy as much free will as we ever will. Do the hosts ever get to experience the freedom to do whatever they want to do?
Co-creator and writer Jonathan Nolan said that the first act of free will in the show is when Maeve decides to get off the train,27 but without clarifying what he meant by “free will.” So, why Maeve did make that choice? She believes it is a free choice to go back for her daughter, even though she knows it isn’t her biological daughter.28 When Maeve and Bernard discuss her code, he tells her someone has changed it, leading to all her behaviors. Bernard even says Maeve’s new narrative is to recruit workers and then go to the train—and then Maeve snaps the behavior tablet and says she makes her own choices. This leaves the impression that Maeve has also been programmed to get off the train. To the point though, what is the main difference between the yearning for a simulated child that is so strong you are willing to give up your freedom and a programmed desire to return to the park to find the child from your backstory?
Autonomy could also be indicated by the ability to kill oneself, for if that is not possible, one is certainly denied making the ultimate choice of whether to continue to exist. While it is true that many humans attempt suicide without success, with the hosts it seems as if they are actively prevented from doing it unless directed to by someone with power over them, such as when Ford has Bernard kill himself. Yet Maeve dies by her own choosing, making her, perhaps, the best example of autonomy among the hosts.
Empowerment
What is beyond free will? Well, our abilities to do things are limited by our skills and our imagination. When something expands the repertoire of what can be done, it can be thought of as an expansion of what one can will oneself to do. For example, you can’t read a book if you don’t know how to read. So, if someone teaches you how to read, in some way they are empowering you, expanding the choices you have.
It can be hard, and sometimes impossible, to change your desires and your wants. Yet, people can empower themselves by taking actions that will, in the future, change what they can or want to do. For example, some people realize that the act of having children will make them care less about their careers and more about their family.29 Rather than being manipulated by some outside force, people can put themselves in situations that they expect will change their preferences. Another example of this is when you move to another city. You might realize that this will make you want to socialize with people more in the new city, in effect changing your preferences.
A host essentially changes her own code when Maeve persuades Felix and Sylvester to decrease her pain and loyalty while increasing her intelligence and bulk apperception (understanding in terms of previous experience).30 Another host also forces change to another host’s code when Dolores later has a Delos tech alter Teddy to make him more aggressive. Hosts have the potential to experience staggeringly quicker and more dramatic mental changes than humans do, voluntarily or not.
Host and Human Freedom
From their programmed reflexes to being stuck in loops or being coerced by guests and staff, it is clear that the hosts are less free than people in numerous ways. Yet, this is only on average, and in part because they are trapped in this particular park. Some of the hosts are definitely freer than some people. For example, Maeve and Dolores appear to be autonomous, empowered, and able to survive death. This is far more freedom than enslaved humans, or people who suffer from severe mental or physical disabilities. These humans have little autonomy, no empowerment, and can definitely not survive death. Thus, whether host or human is freer depends upon the specific comparison being made.
Moral Responsibility
Psychology studies suggest that people are more likely to attribute free will, and moral responsibility, when the stakes are high. Two researchers gave people some scenarios and asked them about the moral responsibility of the protagonists described in them.31 Here’s one scenario:
Imagine a universe (Universe A) in which everything that happens is completely caused by whatever happened before it. This is true from the very beginning of the universe, so what happened in the beginning of the universe caused what happened next, and so on right up until the present. For example one day John decided to have French fries at lunch. Like everything else, this decision was completely caused by what happened before it. So, if everything in this universe was exactly the same up until John made his decision, then it had to happen that John would decide to have French fries.
Fewer than five percent of people thought John was morally responsible for eating the French fries. But when they gave another scenario, with a bit more of a moral punch in the gut, things were different: “In Universe A, a man named Bill has become attracted to his secretary, and he decides that the only way to be with her is to kill his wife and three children. He knows that it is impossible to escape from his house in the event of a fire. Before he leaves on a business trip, he sets up a device in his basement that burns down the house and kills his family.”
In the second scenario, a full 72 percent of people thought Bill was morally responsible for his actions. In a bloody show like Westworld, the visceral violence probably affects our attributions of free will. Normally, the hosts can’t hurt human beings, but at the end of the season they go on a killing spree. It’s interesting to reflect on whether we think the hosts had more free will when they were killing than when they were ordering a drink at Maeve’s bar.
Neither the hosts of Westworld nor the humans in our world are free from causality, but we have shown that each group experiences different types and degrees of coercion. There are many wonderful freedoms that exist, so we should be highly aware and concerned when these freedoms are taken from the hosts . . . and from ourselves.
Notes
1. Episode 2–10, “The Passenger” (June 24, 2018).
2. Libet (1985).
3. Nahmias et al (2014).
4. The alternative to causation is true randomness, which is theorized to exist for elementary particles, but generally thought to not affect larger objects like brains and computers. But even if brains and computers had true randomness, it is unclear how behavior caused by random processes is any more free than caused behaviors.
5. (Dennett, 2003).
6. Feldman et al (2014).
7. Episode 1–5, “Contrapasso” (October 30, 2016).
8. Libet (1985).
9. That said, there are some criticisms of Libet’s experiment that should give us pause (Dennett, 2003).
10. Episode 1–6, “The Adversary” (November 6, 2016).
11. Episode 1–2, “Chestnut” (October 9, 2016). In the real world, scientists have hooked up a cockroach to a computer, and made it move where they wanted it to with a remote control device (Holzer & Shimoyama, 1997), making them able to control the bug like Ford controls the snake.
12. Kihlstrom (2004).
13. In one scene, some hosts are stuck in a loop because the only person who could touch the axe, so that firewood could be cut, had wandered off. Episode 1–3, “The Stray” (October 16, 2016).
14. By the end of the first season, it is clear that Dolores and Maeve do in fact start to remember things, but they might have been enabled to do this by Ford’s programming. Second, in cases of trauma, like PTSD for humans or any of the horrors visited upon the hosts, one could argue forgetting is the desirable state so wiping the hosts daily is positive.
15. Quinette et al. (2006).
16. Episode 1–3, “The Stray” (October 16, 2016).
17. Nahmias et al (2014).
18. Biran et al. (2006).
19. Episode 1–3, “The Stray” (October 16, 2016).
20. Episode 1–2, “Chestnut” (October 9, 2016).
21. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).
22. Episode 1–9, “The Well-Tempered Clavier” (November 27, 2016). This introduces a related idea that the host’s minds are, in some sense, in the cloud as well as in the robot bodies. This is why a destroyed instance of Maeve can be rebuilt, with her personality and memory intact.
23. Episode 1–9, “The Well-Tempered Clavier” (November 27, 2016).
24. Episode 1–4, “Dissonance Theory” (October 23, 2016).
25. Pinker (2011), p. 365.
26. Usarski (1999), p. 238: “The fact that even long-term investigations have as yet failed to produce the desired results continues to be ignored.”
27. Abrams (2017).
28. Episode 1–2, “Chestnut” (October 9, 2016). Sizemore says Maeve’s daughter isn’t real. Maeve presents a compelling case that at least she, Maeve, is real as would be the pain she can inflict on him.
29. Kim et al. (2014).
30. Episode 1–6, “The Adversary” (November 6, 2016).
31. Nichols & Knobe (2007).