Westworld’s Creators Know Why Sci-Fi Is So Dystopian

The first season of Westworld wasted no time in going from “hey cool, robots!” to “well, that was bleak.” Death, destruction, android torture—it’s all been there from the pilot onward. Then again, on a show about a theme park staffed with sentient robots—sorry, “hosts”—those outcomes are exactly what audiences have come to expect. If science fiction has taught folks anything, it’s that the machines will always rise up against humankind. But why does sci-fi always veer dystopian? Westworld’s creators have a theory.

Storytelling, according to show co-creator Jonathan Nolan, serves an evolutionary purpose, allowing us to try out different realities. With sci-fi, because it’s so often forward-looking, “we’re inventing cautionary tales for ourselves,” Nolan said today at WIRED’s 2017 Business Conference in New York. In other words, when your creations would hurt a fly, it’s time to start worrying.

So does that mean Nolan and his co-creator (and wife) Lisa Joy think Westworld is a foreseeable future? Not entirely. For Nolan, the robots on his show represent more of an allegory for human behavior than a cautionary tale. And Joy sees Westworld, and sci-fi in general, as an opportunity to talk about what humanity could or should do if things start to go wrong, especially now that advancements in artificial intelligence technologies are making things like androids seem far more plausible than before. “We’re leaping into the age of the unfathomable, the time when machines [can do things we can’t],” Joy said.

Even though their show loosely taps into the dystopian trope of the AI uprising, Westworld’s co-creators don’t think the actual AI being developed right now will lead to total apocalypse. Instead, Joy said, little bits of AI—like Amazon predicting your purchasing needs or cars helping you drive home—will take over people’s lives piecemeal. Right now, however, “these technologies don’t have a moral compass yet,” Nolan said, adding that thanks to the algorithms telling people what news they might want to read and what opinions they might want to hear, “we’re in a time of artificial ignorance.”

If and when true androids do arrive, though, don’t expect them to look like the passing-for-human hosts of Westworld, though. “We anthropomorphized what the AI will look like,” Joy says. “That’s not going to happen. It’s not going to be a beautiful lady or a beautiful man who is going to come and be your overlord.”



Wired