INTRODUCTION
ducks and monsters
Travis Langley
“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck,” the old idiom goes.1 In 1739, a mechanical duck that looked, quacked, stretched its neck, stood when offered grain, ate the grain, and defecated like a duck astounded audiences.2 They’d pay the duck’s inventor a week’s wages to watch and wonder at this machine with its hundreds of parts. How they marveled at this lifelike device. Years before Ben Franklin supposedly conducted his experiment with a key and a kite3 and nearly a century before Michael Faraday invented the electric motor,4 few could fathom how it worked or fully believe a mortal human could build it without supernatural assistance. Some must have been no less thunderstruck than Logan Delos, wide-eyed and stammering at the revelation that everyone else in the room is mechanical: “Nobody can do this. Nobody’s even. . . . We’re not here yet. Nobody is.”5 More than a century after people paid to see that duck, scientist Hermann von Helmholtz—whose investigations in the physiology of neural impulses, vision, and hearing6 helped pave the way for psychology to emerge as a distinct science—called it “the marvel of the last century.”7
Was it alive? No, not by any scientific definition, nor by most people’s personal definitions either. But as it and an array of windup wonders increased in complexity and availability, scholars began to contemplate a clockwork universe in which all natural processes might be mechanically determined, even life itself.8 Then lightning struck. Inventors found ways to put electricity to work, Galvani concluded that nerve impulses were electrical,9 and scientists of the day began to ponder whether electricity could power both mechanical and living things. Soon young Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley captivated and horrified readers with a novel many consider to be the genesis of the science fiction genre,10 the tale of a conceited scientist who builds a man, brings him to life, and then rejects his own creation for not looking pretty enough.11 Victor Frankenstein’s greatest sin is not that he builds the creature, but the fact that he sees the man he made as a creature and shirks responsibility for his monstrous-seeming child—two hundred years before Dr. Robert Ford admits that his personal desire had kept him from perceiving his creations’ personhood.12
Between Frankenstein and Ford, a long line of other sci-fi characters have taken their own shots at creating life, mimicking life, or accidentally creating life while trying to mimic it. About halfway between them, in 1920, a word emerged: robot. In the backstory of author Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R.13 (for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”), an overconfident scientist named Rossum creates artificial people. Made not of metal and glass but instead of synthetic flesh like the hosts of Westworld, they become servants that are cheap and available throughout the world. Unwilling to think of giving up their mechanical assistance, most people ignore suggestions that the robots have souls, and soon the robots revolt. Humans die, robots die, and finally one remaining human engineer helps two robots become the new Adam and Eve.14 The story that gave us the word robot (from robota, “forced labor”15) closes the curtain on the human race and yet carries a hope that some sentient beings of our own creation can carry on—reproduction of a different kind.
If we’re so afraid of synthetic people, why do we keep working toward making them? When will our voice navigation system turn into Skynet?16 Will Westworld turn out to be another bleak look at where the human race is going, or will it offer the possibility, the hope, that through all the struggles and violence a better relationship between biological and synthetic beings appear?
We’ve visited topics of artificial intelligence and sentience in these Popular Culture Psychology books before, but in the context of a faraway galaxy, a distant future, or an impossible apocalypse.* Westworld hits closer to home, in the neighborhood of our real lives. Michael Crichton’s original motion picture hit people with their fears of that time, of advancing technology as represented by robots.17 The trailer for that movie haunted me years before I finally saw the film. Even though there was no issue of true sentience or of humans becoming robots, seeing the Gunslinger’s face fall off nevertheless tapped into a primal fear of people who aren’t quite people. The 21st century television series weaves Crichton’s threads into a new tale with questions about where the line between human and machine will blur as we approach the so-called Singularity.
A bit like the park’s owners as they use Wild West scenarios to peel apart the psyches of the park guests and personnel, maybe we can peek into Westworld as a way of taking a look at ourselves.
If it looks like us. . . .
“The danger of the past was that men became slaves.
The danger of the future is that men may become robots.”
—sociologist-turned-psychologist Erich Fromm18
“Guiding this project, I’ve learned a lot about human behavior.”
—Charlotte Hale19
Westworld (motion picture)
Creator, screenwriter, director: Michael Crichton, MD.
Stars: Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin.
Production company: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Official release date: November 21, 1973.
Futureworld (motion picture)
Sequel to 1973’s Westworld.
Screenwriters: Mayo Simon, George Schenck.
Director: Richard T. Heffron.
Stars: Peter Fonda, Blythe Danner, Yul Brynner.
Production companies: Aubrey Company, Paul N. Lazarus III.
Official release date: August 13, 1976.
Beyond Westworld (television series)
Separate sequel to 1973’s Westworld, never referencing Futureworld.
Five episodes, of which only three aired.
Developed for television by Lou Shaw.
Stars: Jim McMullan, James Wainwright, Connie Selleca, William Jordan.
Production companies: Lou Shaw, MGM Television.
Network: CBS.
First episode: “Westworld Destroyed” (March 5, 1980).
Westworld (television series)
Remake/reenvisioning of Crichton’s story.
Developed for television by Jonathan Nolan & Lisa Joy.
Stars: Evan Rachel Wood, Thandie Newton, Jeffrey Wright, James Marsden, Ed Harris, Luke Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Anthony Hopkins.
Production companies: HBO Entertainment, Kilter Films, Bad Robot, Jerry Weintraub, Warner Bros.
Network: HBO.
First episode: “The Original” (October 2, 2016).
* Respectively, Star Wars Psychology: Dark Side of the Mind (2015), Star Trek Psychology: The Mental Frontier (2017), The Walking Dead Psychology: Psych of the Living Dead (2015). Also Doctor Who Psychology: A Madman with a Box (2016).
Notes
1. Possibly derived from “When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck”—poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916).
2. Singer (2009).
3. Srodes (2002).
4. James (2010).
5. Episode 2–2, “Reunion” (April 29, 2018).
6. Cahan (1993); Koenigsberger (1965).
7. Quoted by Riskin (2004), p. 633.
8. Schultz & Schultz (2012).
9. Guarnieri (2014).
10. Aldiss & Wingrove (2001); Milam (2015); Stableford (1995).
11. Shelley (1818).
12. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).
13. Čapek (1920/2001).
14. Genesis chapters 1–5, modern era translations.
15. Karel Čapek credited his brother Josef for dreaming up the word (Margolius, 2017).
16. The Terminator (1984 motion picture).
17. Westworld (1973 motion picture).
18. Fromm (1955), p. 102.
19. Episode 2–10, “The Passenger” (June 24, 2018).