What Humans Should Be

By Brian Ebisuzaki

I want to dig deeper into a question posed during our class’s last lecture: “Who is really ‘human’ in Westworld?” From a biological standpoint, the answer to this question is obvious—the guests who come to visit the park are truly human. They are comprised of organic matter, have cells that grow and die, etc. The hosts, on the other hand, are machine—their skeletons and muscle tissue fabricated, and their “brains” are simply comprised of a small globe sitting meshed between flesh-like material. Despite these clear biological differences, I still more often empathized with the robot characters than the human characters in the show. In other words, there were more times when I could relate to the struggles and emotions of the robots than I could with the human guests.

While the robots throughout the show try to understand the nature of their reality and gradually discover their capacity for love, fear, anger, violence, and contemplation, I saw human characters frequently resort to violent and malicious instincts such as freely picking up women in the saloons, killing any host that so much as bothered them, and stealing money and possessions from the hosts. At times I would catch myself thinking that the hosts felt more “human.” I think it is fascinating to consider that the definition of being human extends beyond biological definitions and laws. Though we are “technically human” as our course title says, we often describe horrific acts as “inhumane,” even though those acts make us no less apart from our biological nature. Are we wrong to say that malicious acts make us any less human? For thousands of years humanity has committed terrible acts: the Holocaust, the Nanjing Massacre of WWII, the genocide of many Native American tribes for the sake of “manifest destiny,” and the usage of slavery as the backbone of American economy. War, death, and pain are just as much a part of human history as are moments of connection, peace, and growth. I think we more often focus on the better parts of human history as defining what it means to be human, when really it appears as though human nature is not just inherently good or inherently bad. Dolores, a host of Westworld, states that “Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world. The disarray. I choose to see the beauty” in season 1. I think that in a similar way, what each of us determines to be “human” is a choice and depends on what we focus on. In other words, I do not think we can build a narrow definition of human nature—rather, our inherent nature is variable from person to person. The robot hosts, at the end of the day, are not technically human (biologically speaking). Yet, depending on what we emotionally and intellectually define as human, it seems possible to view them as either more or less human. For me, I want to see the good that humankind can achieve. As such, when I think that a human or robot character in Westworld (or any science fiction novel for that matter) is more or less “human,” I suppose what I am really thinking is that the character is more or less what I think humans should be.