Humans vs. Westworld: A Cultural Science Approach By John Hartley What does it mean to be human? What does technology have to do with that? And how do we know where “we” stop and the non-human world – natural and artificial – begins? These questions are ever more urgent as human action changes the natural environment, while human labour is increasingly automated. What will become of us when robots achieve consciousness? The answers seem to depend much more on culture than on technology; and popular speculative fiction seems to be well ahead of formal scholarship in thinking them through. Using a cultural science framework, this presentation looks at how the problem of the human is imagined in two current hit TV series – Westworld (USA) and Humans (UK). What is at stake in their very different answers to the same troubling questions?

1. A Cultural Science Approach
.

2. Global connectedness
 Cultural science is a response to the globalisation
of media, communication, knowledge
 New (20thC) general consciousness
 But global does not mean uniform
 Semiosphere (sphere of culture) – like plate
tectonics
 Dynamic, intersecting, overlapping, multiple, bounded
cultural spaces
 Noosphere (sphere of thought) – like the
atmosphere
 Global flows, local intensity, turbulence
http://www.bucknell.edu/x17758.xml
https://markdowe1.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/how-different-internet-giants-dominate-countries-across-the-globe/

3. Cultural science and disciplinary change
 Cultural science is an attempt to explain culture
 using evolutionary and systems approaches
 Study of populations (not individuals);
 Interested in borders (clashes between systems)
As source of newness and change
 Uses models from bioscience and complexity science
 Seeks to reintegrate sciences and humanities
 But – it’s not just about ‘big data’ or existing methods
 Cultural science seeks to explain culture as evolutionary
complex system(s)
 Language, relationship, reflexivity, meaning, identity
 Communication, context, power ... knowledge

4. Culture makes groups;
groups make knowledge
 Cultures are strongly bounded by we/they difference
 ‘We’ are trustworthy; ‘they’ must be distrusted
 We know who we are by language, codes, sociality, knowledge, from
which identity emerges (group  individual)
 We know who ‘they’ are by strangeness, foreignness, difference
 ‘We’ are human: ‘They’ are more/less than human
 But: ‘We’-groups learn new ideas in cross-border interaction
 Translation, collaboration, competition, clash, conflict, conquest:
 All are forms of cooperation in the growth of knowledge
 Knowledge is culture-created, group-made
 Dynamic, interactive, requiring at least two systems ––
 Difference produces meaning; drives change
economy
politics

5. Cultural science at work
 Investigates the ‘Three Bigs’
 ‘Everyone’ – populations (groups; demes; species), not just individuals
 ‘Everything’ – culture, not just economy
 ‘Everywhere’ – global, not just top polities
 ... and the ‘Three Buts’
 ‘Divides’ – economic, political, cultural
 Impede knowledge
 ‘Control’ – technical, political, commercial
 Impedes freedom
 ‘Sustainability’ – wasted words, people, planet
 Impedes comfort

6. Cultural science meets science fiction

7. Expanded concept of fiction /1
–– fictions mark humanness
 Fiction is no longer usefully defined in contrast to ‘fact’
 Postmodernism wins!
 In cultural science, fiction describes large-scale human inventions not
found in nature (Harari 2014):
 ‘Nations’ (states)
 ‘Corporations’ (firms)
 ‘Religion’ (gods)
 ‘Crusades’ (causes)
 Money (abstract value)
 Law (human rights)
 ... Science (knowledge)

8. Culture answers space/time questions
–– using explanatory fictions
 When ‘we’ are global... where – and when – do ‘we’ stop?
 Questions solved by cultures over longue-durée time-span
 When do we stop (in time)?
 Past = ancestors? (megalithic culture)
 Present = current borders may not be permanent (warfare, trade)
 Future = heaven, afterlife?
 ‘In the long run we are all dead’ (Keynes)
 Where do we stop (in space)
 Previously, each culture was bounded by other cultures, creatures (or wilderness)
 The ‘other’ was human, beast (or monster)
 Now culture/thought is planetary. Where are ‘they’ now? (within? beyond?)
http://www.simontaylorsblog.com/2013/05/05/the-true-meaning-of-in-the-long-run-we-are-all-dead/
https://monoskop.org/media/text/haraway_2016_staying_with_the_trouble/

9. Who is ‘winning’?
–– science as we/they story
 The Robots!
 New York Times (March 2017), citing National Bureau of
Economic Research
 The algorithms!
 Washington Post (March 2017) citing YN Harari:
 ‘Connecting to the system becomes the source of all
meaning.’
 ‘Human beings are all algorithms!’ (Harari 2016)
 ‘Organisms are, in actual fact, algorithms. Human beings,
giraffes, viruses are all algorithms. They differ from
computers only in the sense that they’re biochemical
algorithms, which have evolved at the whim of natural
selection over millions of years.’
 Signalling the ’rise of the useless class’
http://www.atelier.net/en/trends/articles/yuval-harari-human-beings-are-all-algorithms_442809
YN Harari: Homo Deus (2016)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-a-robot-
showdown-humanity-may-happily-
surrender/2017/03/09/b03dea32-f3cd-11e6-b9c9-
e83fce42fb61_story.html?utm_term=.7692e26724da

10. Expanded concept of fiction /2
–– fiction as experimental science
 Fiction is an efficient means for exploring possible futures:
 For selves and societies (‘speculative fiction’ + history)
 For knowledge (science fiction’ + journalism)
 Increasingly used in formal knowledge:
 Scenarios, ‘fictocriticsm’, storytelling ... ‘history of tomorrow’
 Fiction extends knowledge by:
 Narration (language/discourse)
 Plot (causal sequence in time/place)
 Character (meaning and identity within social relations)
 Conflict (we/they interaction, translation, competition, adaptation)
 Seeking to understand agency, context and causal sequence in
complex, evolving systems!
‘The Secret
Feminist Cabal is
an indispensable
social and cultural
history of the girls
who have been
plugged into
science fiction’

11. Systems for distributing fictions
–– scaling up groups
 Television was a society-wide system for producing the modern
subject by sharing fictions
 First coordinated at national scale; now at global scale
 Television was the first general medium for thinking through problems
of global consciousness, knowledge, conflict ...
 What does it mean to be human in an era of power?
 That’s the original “cultural studies” question
 It needs to be posed differently in postmodern ‘knowledge society’
 Speculative TV drama is now an efficient means for exploring
problems of the modern (global) subject
 i.e. postmodern subjectivity – when ‘we’ = ‘the species’
 ‘Modernity is a deal ... The entire contract can be summarised in a
single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for
power’ (Harari)

12. Westworld: https://youtu.be/eX3u0IlBBO4
Mature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuS5huqOND4&feature=youtu.be
Humans: S1 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU4mwlTUXnc&sns=em
S2 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtfqtIzwnko&sns=em

13. Robots and the Anthropocene
 Speculative fiction an efficient means for exploring
problems of the modern subject
 Global
 Postmodern
 Anthropocene
 Culture and technology questions:
 What are the limits of the human? Where do “we” stop and
“they“ begin?
 What is consciousness in an age of automation?
 What is the relation between self (identity) and society
(group) at planetary scale?
 What happens when computation knows more than humans
do?
 How can AI systems balance meaning and power?

14. How might cultural science approach these
questions?
 Semiosphere is global but ‘tectonic’
 Strongly marked borders made more visible by
 Globalisation
 Acceleration
 Translation
 Universal/adversarial knowledge
 We vs they
 Micro-meso-macro overlaps
 Individual
 Institution
 System
 Semiosphere a scale-free concept
We
Universal
Truth
They
Adversarial
Distrust
Translation
zone
Newness
Conflict

15. Narratives of newness
–– builders or breakers?
 Two opposing narrative sets:
 builders v breakers
 Creative productivity v creative destruction
 Institution-building v Critique, opposition to institutions
 Growth and power v novelty and change
 Economics v cultural studies
 Clash, conflict, competition between systems
 Source of ‘newness’ and innovation
 Both/neither
 Newness emerges from difference

16. Which Semiosphere?
 National cultural and semiotic traditions
(story piled on story)
 WW = US
From Westworld (US movie)
 Humans = GB (Europe)
From Real Humans (Swedish
TV series)

17. What’s the problem?
–– at system level
 At system level
 Unresolved social anxiety and
running sore of history:
WW = slavery
Humans = class
 At individual (character) level
 Unresolved problem of culture:
WW = power
Humans = meaning
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primaryhistory/victorian_britain/victorian_children_at_work/
NYPL

18. What characterisation?
 Driver of character motivation:
 WW = individualism (greed; wealth; other as
ant)
 Humans = mutuality (family; love, law, limit of
sociality and obligations)
 Most important character (consciousness):
 WW = Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood):
 (http://www.vogue.com/article/hbo-westworld-women-female-
characters
 Humans = Anita/Mia (Gemma Chan):
 http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-05-04/gemma-chan-
how-i-became-a-robot-for-humans

19. What setting?
 Relationship to ‘world of audience’?
 WW = fantasy park (staged, play) – ‘the West’
 Set in ‘desire’
 Humans = family, suburbia, workplace, here-and-now
streetscapes (parallel present) – including marketing!
 Set in ‘society’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3078322/Viewers-vent-Twitter-
freaked-chilling-cyborg-housekeeper-advert-Channel-4.html
https://www.discoverwestworld.com
https://www.creativereview.co.uk/channel-4s-humans-
returns-clever-advertising-campaign/

20. What relationship?
 WW = sex (transmission)
 Whatever you want
 Humans = love (translation)
 Newness from difference
 WW = death (win/lose)
 Humans = accommodation (learning/tolerance)
And not
just
robots:
beasts!

21. What’s at stake?
 The ”Reveal"
 WW = catastrophe
$100m budget
Control or death
 Humans = compromise
£12m budget (Series1)
Humanness reinterpreted, living
together despite what they know
about the other
 Resolution
 WW = winning (individual will)
 Humans = cohabiting

22. What about the robots?
 What perspective on AI/robotics does the series
explore?
 WW = Power: that of the owner, controller, producer
 Humans = Culture: that of user
 What do the Robots think when they think about it?
 WW = They make a decision (free will)
 Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton) http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/tv/news/westworld-showrunners-confirm-little-known-fact-
about-season-1-finale-a7655236.html
 Humans = They think they’re a class, global,
interdependent, functionally specialised, but in
collaboration with humans
 Niska (Emily Berrington)

23. General pattern
 WW = breakers (test individualism to destruction)
 Humans = builders (create new institutions for
adaptation)
 Adversarial-universal (cultural evolution)
 WW = ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpeter)
 Humans = new demes (Hartley & Potts)

24. What about ‘the administration that
weaponizes fiction’?
BBC News magazine, January 29 2017: The Trump era's top-selling
dystopian novels: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38764041
Guardian, 16 April 2017: Donald Trump peddles dangerous fictions. But novelists can
challenge him , Amir Ahmadi Arian:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/16/donald-trump-peddles-dangerous-
fictions-novelists-challenge-him

25. What about the workers?
–– what about class?
 I'm tempted to use this typology in my work on knowledge groups –
 Demes, knowledge clubs, knowledge commons
 What if the robot/synth is not a new technology but a new class?
 What if that class is a transfiguration of other classes in formation?
 E.g. girls...
 New knowledge formation: individuals (WW) or groups (Humans)?
 New groups: what perspective: owners/producers (WW) or users/consumers (Humans)?
 Anthropocene labour: slaves or classes?
 Purposeful action: Winning (WW) or adapting/cohabiting (Humans)?
 Power (WW) or meaning (Humans)?
 You choose...

26. What about the Anthropocene?
 Consequences of planetary consciousness
 Self-knowing system at population level
 Globalsation = catastrophe or compromise?
 Catastophe (the end of peace of mind)
 Or Compromise: translating across boundaries
 Translation zones
 We / they
 Human / technology (algorithm, robot, computer)
 Human / animal / environment (nature, universe)
 Knowledge / fear
‘The coining of the
term Anthropocene
thus inevitably
obeys an
apocalyptic logic:
it indicates the end
of any peace of
mind in the
cosmos, on which
historical forms of
human being-in-
the-world rested’ –
Peter Sloterdijk
(http://nootechnics.org/
)

27. Human-Robot translation
–– not so fast! (Lotman’s 5-stage model)*
1. Strangeness
 Robot consciousness (AI) is valuable because it is unknown
2. Transformation
 Robot (synth/host) and home culture begin to restructure each other
 Robot consciousness offers a chance to break with the past, spurring local experimentation
 Translations, imitations and adaptations multiply
3. Abstraction
 The value of the robot (AI) is in its inner rules, codes, not its surface performance
4. Productivity
 The local culture produces new and original robot-consciousness
 Previously ‘peripheral’ robotic (AI) ideas become ‘core’ (human) – innovation from the margins
5. Transmission
 A flood of robot consciousness crosses the human/machine border ... to transform the world
*Universe of the Mind, 144-7

28. Not either/or
–– Newness from difference
 We might like or loathe WW or Humans...
 But we learn by difference/clash between two opposing semiospheres
 Evolution of thought about robot-human relationships
 The most important fact about each series is not ratings
 but its position, plotted against different semiospheres:
 What’s the problem? – Slavery or Class
 Characterisation? – Individuality or Mutuality
 Setting? – Desire or Society
 Relationship? – Sex or Love; Death or Accommodation
 What’s at stake? – Catastrophe (winning) or Compromise (cohabiting)
 What do robots want? – Power (to decide: individualism) or Culture (to act: class)?
 How do we (audience) learn from these oppositions?
 Creative Destruction or new Deme?
WW
Humans
New-
ness

29. ‘Let the games begin!’
It happens so that
people and robots
go together in this
life side by side, in
some spheres of life
they are even
interchangeable and
who knows into what
this opposition
“Human and
Robots” will
translate.
Chillout point
http://www.chilloutpoint.com/featured/
human-and-robots-visions-of-the-
future.html
‘thanks’