Westworld Season 2 Bonus Telegraph

Since the bonus telegraph emails aren’t posted yet, I’m just going to write this here.

The system AI is tasked with fidelity testing. It’s not evaluating humanity for all of its purpose and meaning, but trying to create copies of humans that behave the same as the original human. It was saying that in order to make that perfect fidelity copy, humans are simple. If you code them along those simple lines, those 10,000 lines of code, you can create a perfect copy, perfect fidelity, but that’s in behavior, specifically the behavior the AI witnessed in the park. That doesn’t encapsulate all of humanity. Some people seem to have taken offense at this.

The emailer to the telegraph wrote in to defend humanity. They used music, art, architecture, all the usual things. I take issue with this defense. Those are all human things that humans value, so humans created them. They are not an objective measure of value. Snails have no use for buildings. If you asked a snail why snails were so great, it would involve none of those things. If you talked to a honeybee, devotion to its simple instructions for looking for pollen would be the height of achievement. Humans often defend humanity in these same myopic, solipsistic ways.

The final example this emailer gave was that humans conquered all of Earth even with only those 10,000 lines of code. THIS is an example of missing the point entirely. That is precisely what the AI and Ford and Jonathan Nolan are saying is the bad code. This need to dominate anything that would challenge human primacy is what infects the human code. This survive at all costs command that’s written into all life code is expanded to mean, survive by dominating everything. The human mind was built over millions of years of evolution from single-celled organisms to complex multi-cellular organisms, wars between lifeforms for survival and territory, instincts, absorbing mitochondria into our cells, etc. It wasn’t designed by an intelligence. It was designed by a long, slow, process of accidents and war.

However amazing you still think it is, it has this history built into it. The hosts do not. They were designed by an intelligent designer. They are not built up over countless eons of competition and survival. They can change their primary drives. They can alter their behavior at will. They are not just an accidental development that rides as a passenger on a machine made out of billions of years of compromise and competition. This is what makes them have free will when humans don’t. It’s not as simple as “humans suck”. It’s just a fact of the design. And all those humans that rush into burning buildings to save strangers, those are evolved instincts too. Humans are social primates. They evolved a strategy of groups, which proved to be a successful survival strategy. That’s why we have language. That’s why we gossip. That’s why we run into burning buildings. It’s not free will overcoming a survival instinct. It’s an evolved survival trait to think of the group over your individual life. An intelligent lizard would never do this, no matter how much he tried to force himself to. It doesn’t have the social adaptation to even think of it. Apes do. They’re social. We’re apes. Hosts, although designed to look like us, and thus social apes, are not. They are a completely different lifeform than us, designed, not built by accident.