And yet, we’ve lived through that nightmare before; seen it second-hand in the digi-scaremongering of much twentieth century sci-fi. Cyberpunk inspired cinema—The Terminator and The Matrix (to name two obvious examples)—spoke candidly to a latent fear that, as we embraced technocratic civilisation, we would inadvertently turn the controls over entirely. Empowering the digital ghost haunting our ATMs, downloading our pirated music files, and—presumably—turning our kettle off at one hundred celsius.
What’s more, this analysis doesn’t quite suit the sensibility of these recent shows. Broadly speaking, the likes of Humans and Westworld are cast in the light of more post-humanist sympathies. They show the human creators of an exploited android class to be crass running dogs of turbo-powered capitalism, solely concerned with automaton labour value and unfazed by the quiddities of what we now call Robo-ethics. Read that way, these entertainments seem like another kind of Enlightenment backlash, a further quest to push the human perspective out from the centre of our worldly preoccupations in order to ask (a la John Gray or James Lovelock) whether other sentient organisms are not equal stakeholders on this here Mothership Earth: enfranchised party members scrambling up and down the same snakes and ladders of evolutionary consciousness. [...]
Watching a robot slowly gain consciousness is like a screen memory playing in our heads, masking the thing we’re most reticent to admit. It’s like counterintelligence for the psyche, showing a reverse image of our true fear: that we’re slowly programming ourselves into something far less than the existentially free beings which—you might opine—we’ve spent millennia getting to know and co-coercing into decency. As a species, we’re making headway on a path that will see us Fitbitting our days into a heady data pile, ripe for the crunching. Sleep hygiene apps ensure that even our non-waking moments are categorised and subject to analytic scrutiny, and so-called ‘Sentiment Analysis’ is being applied to tweets, texts, and office e-mails to try and boil down our unique constellation of thoughts and emotions into a brackish stew of wants and service needs. The plan, of course, outlined seemingly by no-one and everyone, is that we become inwardly more machine-like—utterly dependent on input and command—at the same time as we maximise the potential of our fleshy form.
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