WARNING: Spoilers ahead! Do not read if you’ve yet to watch the Westworld season finale!
Last week saw the first season of HBO’s new hit sci-fi series “Westworld” come to a fiery and explosive end. After a long and suspenseful nine weeks, the show’s complex and carefully crafted plot finally winded down to what seemed at first like a formal ending… Before letting the defecation hit the oscillation and leaving us with a cliffhanger to wonder about for more than a year. “Westworld” showrunners Lisa Joy and her husband Jonathan Nolan have confirmed that we will have to wait until at least 2018 before season two arrives. Evidently, this series is one that needs a long production period to get right.
I personally enjoyed “Westworld,” and Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB show that most critics and ordinary viewers (respectively) share my sentiment. Where I found most faults with the show was how it made plot “twists” such a priority that some more in-depth character development was skipped over for clever editing and cinematography. This is particularly evidently with William’s descent into madness and eventual transformation into the Man in Black. Though William does loosen up a bit throughout the series, he never really seems unhinged and sadistic until the last two episodes, making the transformation seem a bit overly rushed.
Even more outrageous was the fact that this “twist” only worked before the younger and older incarnations of William were played by two different actors: Jimmi Simpson and Ed Harris, respectively. Strangely, this method for portraying aging was skipped over in favor of CGI when it came to de-aging Anthony Hopkins’s character Robert Ford… Even though young Ford was shown at a time earlier in the story’s past than William… Guess consistency only matters when it doesn’t get in the way of trying to hide plot twists, right? In the end, most plot twists were fairly predictable, as many major revelations had already been predicted by the fan base on Reddit since episode two.
A minor complaint that I saw from some critics was the portrayal of violence in the series, particularly against women. At this notion, I scoff. I personally felt no sense of overwhelming cruelty toward women / female androids in particular. Men / male androids undergo their own painful demises throughout the duration of the show: the lab technicians’ deaths at the hands (and mouth) of Armistice, the Man in Black scalping Kissy alive, etc. This idea of overwhelming violence toward women seems even more ridiculous when you consider the absurd amounts of actual violence committed against women in the real world today. Remember, every year, more than 1,000 women and girls are murdered by their own families in “honor killings” in Pakistan. Add to that the rape epidemic in Europe due to the flood of incoming Muslim migrants, the terrible conditions women face throughout Africa, the enforced patriarchal and misogynist societies of Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the continuous rape and selling of Yazidi sex slaves by ISIS, and (among other atrocities not even mentioned here) very quickly the brutalization of female androids, often for plot-related purposes, seems absolutely trivial.
What is most interesting about “Westworld” though is its depiction of AI. More than four decades have passed since the original “Westworld” film premiered in 1973. Since then, AI has advanced at a rapid and often startling pace, and the vision presented by “Westworld” no longer seems like a distant future possibility. Nolan himself confirms that the series still takes place in the 21st century during a behind-the-scenes look at the show. Similarly, two separate economic analyses of the cost of visiting the park both assumed that the show takes place only 50 years or so into the future (Lost other link but one analysis here). Indeed, in the age of Siri, Amazon Echo, and Google Home, it’s not difficult to see how Westworld can easily become a reality within our lifetimes.
I truthfully do think that Westworld offers a plausible and perhaps inevitable view of the future of AI. You only need two simple conditions for the Singularity to occur (when AI overall intelligence and capability exceeds that of humans), and machines can pass the Turing test (when interaction with AI becomes indistinguishable from interaction with humans). One is that technology will continue to increase in complexity and capability. The other is that, given that our brains are not made of anything other than atoms, recreating consciousness and a human mind using other atoms is entirely possible. I’m sure most if not all of you will agree that both of those conditions are true today. If that is the case, then what stands in the way of Westworld becoming reality one day?
“They say that great beasts once roamed this world, big as mountains. Now they’re just bone and amber… Your bones will turn to sand, and on that sand a new god will walk.”
- Evan Rachel Wood (as Delores in “Westworld”)
“These violent delights have violent ends.”
- Friar Laurence / William Shakespeare (“Romeo and Juliet,” Act II, Scene VI)
