I am disappointed because I think the show is focused on a single ethical/moral issue to the exclusion of multiple others, to the point it is blind to some very nasty, arguably evil stuff. The one issue it cares about is the ethics of creating conscious or even near-conscious robots and then treating them as property. So it gets into the issue of what it means to be human, and when do other non-human beings have human-level rights, and it evokes slavery, and I get why that is interesting. but along the way it gets so many other things wrong or ignores them completely.
Ford and Arnold start their project which is to open a theme park with believable AI robots that have no consciousness. Then Arnold goes off-book. As Ford explains:
"Our hosts began to pass the Turing test after the first year, but that wasn't enough for Arnold. He wasn't interested in the appearance of intellect, of wit. He wanted the real thing. He wanted to create consciousness." So the show posits a distinction between the appearance of consciousness and the real thing, which I think is right and proper. But then it manipulates us by prompting and encouraging our tendency to empathize with the hosts who seem so human. Plus, we know what nobody in the story but Arnold and Ford knows, which is that the hosts are in fact conscious and human-ish, at least.
Back to Arnold. He gives the hosts inner voices, and memory and eventually emotional pain, and his plan reaches it's fulfillment in Delores. But then he worries that Ford ,and the rest of the team and the world at large might be threatened by conscious robots and destroy what he achieved. So he overwrites Delores's free will, giving her a mass murder subroutine, figuring this event will keep the park from opening and the conscious robots will remain after he uses Delores to commit suicide by proxy. But Ford figures out what happened and cleans up the robots using his own back-door controls. He dampens but does not fully excise their consciousness so the park opens and runs for 30 or so years making money, and undergoing one ownership change along the way. Let's come back to all that but let's stop here because this alone is enough material to teach a full-semester seminar in personhood and ethics.
Bernard creates life, more or less, with no plan for all the inevitable contingencies or any apparent concern for his creations or existing fellow humans. In a best case scenario what happens to the conscious hosts? Do they happily and productively in a separate community, or do they integrate into human society? What does it mean to be all-but-human but have no experience of childhood, and no expectation of death? If they have independent agency they should have not just rights but responsibilities. They should become responsible for paying for their upkeep, and energy needs (something never discussed in the series). Does Bernard have any plan for all that? No. Will they date, court, have relationships and maybe marry? Will they create art? Will they want to engage in the ultimate act of creation -- reproduction? How will that work if the population never dies? What about the hosts he created as children? They are created with the emotional maturity suitable to their physical apparent age. Will they mature emotionally? How do you justify creating an independent consciousness that will mature and then trap it in the body of a 4 year old? Or did he plan to stunt the emotional growth of child hosts to match their physical appearance, which is equally cruel. What about the ones who are built to appear elderly? Maybe they don't feel physical pain, but their motor functions appear to be limited, and let's face it, who is going to want to kiss them, or more. The never get to experience young love, at least not with a young body. That sucks, and Arnold seems not to consider any of this. For that matter how do you even justify creating unattractive hosts? He could have made them all beautiful, both male and female. But he didn't. That was not for their benefit. It is for the benefit of the humans who interact with them so they seem more normal. Brad Pitt looks like he does and I look like me and that's just life. But the hosts were the result of intelligent design. Bernard intentionally made some hosts more attractive than others. Even in a host society there will be benefits to being attractive. He just willy-nilly confers these benefits on some more than others. Did he ever think about the implications?
How does he justify forcing Delores to kill almost everyone she knows, and also force Teddy to collaborate with her? It's extraordinarily selfish to create consciousness with a limited free will that he can override any times he wants. And then he uses that to engage in mass murder and commit suicide by proxy. What effect does he expect this to have on her? In doing so, he intentionally creates a mess hoping that Ford and the other engineers won't be able to shut them down and they will be forced not to open the park. But he has no plan to help them deal with a fully conscious powerful robot with a genocidal tendencies. Plus, if it worked, he basically destroyed the entire investment of Ford and whoever else backed this enormous project. And then he kills himself, leaving, with his best intentions, fully conscious robots who cannot age, cannot grow, and cannot reproduce, and whose other life options are needless limited. He has no plan for their economic needs or utility.
What a fucking asshole. He is possibly the most evil monster in fiction, and nobody in the story seems to have any sense of this, because all anyone thinks about is just one moral question: are all the other humans mean to the hosts?
Back to Ford. He manages to realize what happened and destroy Arnold's dream. But instead of wiping the robots clean, he leaves them with enough of a fragment of consciousness such that most of them go insane over the next few decades. He then decommissions them and leaves them turned off, standing naked in a warehouse, which he occasionally visits to engage in chats with one old guy. What a fucking creep. He never tells anyone the robots are semi-conscious. If anyone starts treating them as human he berates them. As far as anyone knows they are completely non-conscious lifelike toys who can pas a Turing test but have no real personhood. So they kill them, and rape them, and abuse them over and over, while he secretly starts revisiting and completing Arnold's work. Only William/MIB figures out there's a ghost in the machine when he shoots Maeve and her daughter. Everyone else is clueless. And the robots keep going insane, until Ford decides it's time to fulfill Arnold's dream,
He sets Delores on her journey again, but never cleans up her Wyatt, mass-murdering tendencies. He programs Maeve on her escape plot. That ends up killing several techs and countless security people. The show makes clear that we're not to feel bad about them because Sylvester is a Grade A jerk, and the tech we never saw before was about to rape Hector. We never get any invitation to empathize with any of the multiple security people mowed down by Hector or Armistice. Why? Because they mistreated robots they had every reason to believe had no consciousness? Look, if Ford and Arnold created the world they agreed upon, with lifelike but non-conscious playthings, I agree it still is a pretty disreputable endeavor. It's basically a fully interactive purveyor of both sex porn and torture porn, but that's several steps less evil than the actual rape, dismemberment and death inflicted upon conscious entities trapped in robot bodies subject to programming overrides. And only Arnold and Ford are responsible for that. I don't admire the guests or the techs who abuse their access, but believing as they did that the hosts are empty shells, they don't deserve to be abused and killed. Yet the show clearly invites us to that conclusion and to side with the robots. The way the show introduced the lube/rape tech guy made this so clear the manipulation was over-the-top and it pissed me off.
The same goes for the guests at the party, some of whom are shot by Delores and the rest are about to be set upon by a suddenly conscious gang of violent, insane hosts.. And Ford's plan for what to do as he bequeath this gift upon the world is, yes, a second suicide by proxy. Here folks, you deal with it. So the only two people in the story actually responsible for knowingly abusing conscious hosts are Arnold and Ford, who are treated to hyper-romanticized death scenes they choose for themselves. I feel bad for the hosts, but I'm pissed off that I'm being manipulated to empathize with them as they embark on their revenge murder spree on humans who hold no responsibility for their condition.
