What makes us human? | Storm Internet

What makes us human? Westworld, humanoids and technology.

Westworld has received great reviews as one of the best science fiction series television has witnessed for a while.  But could anyone experience it for real in his lifetime? Just wonder about a world where one might get to act out our deepest, wildest fantasies. Westworld indeed challenges us to consider what being human actually means when you see acts such as murder carried out by the human visitors on the humanoids of Westworld as the humanoids are unable to hurt a living soul.

In Westworld you can pay to storm through the swinging doors of a saloon, gulp down a whiskey, and then pull out your handgun and fill a bandit with lead – without actually killing anyone for real. Does it sound great? Well in the universe of Westworld it is just what people are looking for.  A place inhabited completely by humanoid technologies existing solely to play out the fantasies of those who visit.

Since the outset of this new serialisation on HBO the watchers are confronted with acts of violence of human on robot. Of course, for drama sake the park visitors are made up of a mixture of nasty characters wishing to act out the most depraved of fantasies and the malfunctioning machines which turn against them.  But just how close are we to an immersive world like the one in Westworld? How far has technology come?

Science fiction often does become science fact.

If we talk about the humanoid bodies, the advanced research track is suggesting that it might be easier to create artificial humans, rather than forming the robotic frames covered in human-like skin which has been used in the show. Some recent progressions in regenerative medicine might see this all as a truth sooner than the one might think.

The most chilling and fascinating part of the robots in Westworld are their emotions. They possess more than only human-like physical bodies. They showcase emotion encompassing extreme pain, they see and identify the sufferings of each other and they too bleed and even die. This emotional aspect makes them more real than they are expected to be.

So it seems we could build physically realistic bodies but not emotionally realistic ones? There is so much that is still unknown about what makes us tick and what makes us human.