Westworld is a science-fiction film (1973) and TV series (2016-2022) that is based on the premise of a theme-park populated by AI robots role-playing the setting of the American “West”.

It’s been ten years since I’ve seen the show (and I only watched the first season), so I can’t remember the details well. However, I wanted to reflect a bit on the central premise, and how we are moving toward a real-life Westworld.

The American West, as depicted through the Western genre, was a period of settler expansion marked by blurred lines between “civilisation” and “nature”. “Civilisation” in this case means laws, practices, administration, institutions. “Nature” is the wilderness, freedom, the open land, baser instincts. The “Cowboy” stands midway between the two, capable of transgressing the law (or taking the law into their own hands), but ultimately with the aim of protecting and serving the community. The cowboy is never fully settled; the classic Western image is of the cowboy riding off into the sunset after successfully removing the threat from the burgeoning civilisation and ensuring its future success.

We are living through a new “frontier” time in relation to AI. The future is open and unsettled. There is a battle between the founders of giant AI companies, who want to act like cowboys - free from the bounds of institutions and regulation - and governments, workers, and others who are already quite settled and perhaps not at all ready for such radical shifts to the practices of daily life and work.

If we go by the myth of the Western, the cowboys are the “good guys”, with old, bloated institutions holding them back. Think of the old British empire vs. the more radical, free American revolutionaries that were ready for a change.

However, the real fight is between two types of “frontier” communities, two cowboy factions. The first is who I’ve mentioned above; the tech giants. The second is a group which is invisible to the majority of people - the community of software developers, computer scientists and network engineers who build and maintain the internet and computer systems we all depend so heavily on today.

These are people who gather on mailing lists or conferences to talk about their work, in many cases on a voluntary basis. They shepherd and contribute to the open source libraries that are used in every device in the world. They are mostly “unregulated”, non-state actors, organically coming together to solve technical problems in a collective and collaborative way. Just like the cowboy at the end of the Western, when the work is done, when a new standard is developed, they fade into the background and civilisation chugs along, unaware of the sacrifices and work that was done to make sure that this or that connection is properly encrypted, or this or that software runs a bit faster.

Over recent months, there is increasing evidence of the extreme pressures that these communities are under, due to the impact of AI. There is now a real risk that these communities will either disappear, or that their role in society will be highly diminished. They will be replaced by AI-driven code development and patches. AI models which are developed and funded through a network of highly private and profit-driven enterprises. Ownership of the open code and infrastructure that supports modern technology will shift from a collective/public based model to a model driven by LLMs developed and owned by private interests. This is an encroachment that has been going on for decades, with a handful of private hyperscalers increasingly running much of the internet infrastructure, and social media and advertising companies shaping the majority of the end-user experience. However, with AI and the flood of AI contributions to open source development, the last “frontier” of free software is now gradually eroding away.

The marriage between the sci-fi and western genres is an interesting one; both deal with the “frontier” in different ways (one backward looking and nostalgic/conservative, the other forward looking and progressive). The point of Westworld is that both of these are an illusion. The robots aren’t really here to serve our needs (at least, any high-ideals we may have as a civilisation) and the West was not so idyllic. The “frontier” promise that is being sold by AI companies is similarly an illusion. We are, piece by piece, replacing real, community-driven work with robots who are play-acting as software developers. We are creating our own “Westworld”; a simulation of an idealised setting. The real ingredients of civilisation are the community bonds and trust that are built through collective action. All we may be left with in a few years (in relation to computing/software) is the obligation to “trust” the AI models.

As I said, I don’t remember the details of Westworld, but I remember it didn’t end well for them.