📺 (Re)watching Westworld.
Humans invent a theme park populated by supposedly memory-less, insensible androids; mere automatons there solely to allow the (rich) customers to live out their wild-west fantasies . Something other than hilarity ensues.
I’d watched season one several years ago and vaguely remember it being one of the finest and most fascinating pieces of TV in a long while. Season two to be honest I don’t remember very much from at all, not sure if that’s their fault or mine, we’ll see. Season 3 and 4 I haven’t yet had the pleasure of.
From the very beginning though, the show does hit a bit differently in a today’s world where artificially intelligent drink-serving robots already exist, albeit typically less clothed in artificial human skin than their Westworld equivalents are.
It doesn’t stop there. Out here in our world, real people are already falling in love with their virtual AI companions. And there’s a non-zero contingent of folk out there who suspect that even today’s chatbots are already sentient and surely many more who are working, at least tangentially, on the issue of making them so.
Their electronic brains certainly already have memories, so perhaps we best treat them more nicely than the show park’s visitors treat Delores just in case.
Kind-of spoiler ahead: The whole weird billionaire’s big business secretly surveilling everyone’s data whilst you feel like you’re being entertained is also not exclusive to the fictional world, nor are the big potentially catastrophic leaks of the resulting information.