Financial Pressures: Overlooking for Profit
By Jordan Powers
Westworld poses a philosophical question: “What is consciousness?” It shows machines, the hosts, speaking and thinking rationally, having human-like emotions, and forming meaningful bonds with both other hosts and with park guests. And yet, they do not fully act as conscious individuals, instead appearing to be scripted characters: staying on the same “loops,” performing the same actions day-after-day, having the same conversations over and over. However, they are shown to be trying to escape their loops and make their own decisions, implying that they are conscious beings.
This question of consciousness has deep ethical implications in the world of Westworld. If the hosts are truly conscious beings, then the cruelty inflicted upon them by the park guests is extremely unethical and abhorrent. If they’re just unthinking machines, then the rape, torture, and murder of the hosts is similar to punching your computer monitor in a fit of anger: it’s wasteful and expensive, but not fundamentally wrong. In the show, the corporation that owns the park gives no thought to this dilemma: the hosts are just assumed to be non-conscious, and the mistreatment of them is allowed to continue. This lack of thought is a direct result of the financial motivations of the park—since, if the hosts were considered conscious and granted the same individual rights as humans, the park would not be able to continue to sell the “Westworld” experience of rape, torture, and murder.
This mismatch of financial and ethical concerns can be viewed as a warning for our modern society. Financial pressures blinding us to the ethical implications of our business practices is an ancient tradition in human society. From slave merchants and plantation owners overlooking, or falsely justifying, the unethical nature of slavery to the oil companies downplaying or ignoring the inevitable outcomes of climate change, humans have a history of ignoring uncomfortable facts that might hurt their own self-interest. Westworld is showing us how that tradition might work in a world of sentient machines and warning us not to make the same mistakes as the past. Just as how there was a reckoning for slavery and there will be a reckoning for climate change, Westworld shows us a reckoning for the mistreatment of artificial consciousness, one that threatens humanity’s very existence.
This practice of overlooking uncomfortable facts is the core of Silicon Valley’s ethos “move fast and break things.” Westworld is a practical warning, telling us that we need to challenge this ethos and work to create a culture that prioritizes ethical practices as much or more than profitable practices. More and more, big tech companies are engaging in ethically questionable practices in order to increase advertising revenue, such as Facebook enabling and encouraging the spread of dangerous misinformation. It’s even at the point where Google had to take “don’t be evil” out of their company motto. We need to stage a peaceful revolution, to revise this ethos, before our own reckoning comes.