HBO’s Westworld debuts on Sunday as a major TV show that delves into enduring sci-fi and morality themes about whether we should create human-like artificial intelligent beings, how we should treat them, and what’s the difference between humans and machines. I talked in a group with the creators of the show, and during that conversation, video games, virtual reality, and real-world technology came up over and over.
It’s a show that is relevant to Silicon Valley, techies, sci-fi fans, and gamers. That may not be obvious, as it’s a Western, but it speaks to the frontiers of technology and how we behave when we play. The show is a remake of Michael Crichton’s sci-fi film of 1973, where rich guests can take a vacation in the almost-real theme park of Westworld, which is full of androids who are instructed not to harm the human guests. The human guests can do anything they want, with no consequences, according to the corporation that runs the technological paradise.
The show runs with Crichton’s original idea of the theme park inmates turning on their masters. Filmmaker JJ Abrams broached the idea of a remake 20 years ago, and HBO finally made it happen with executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. I joined watched the first three episodes and attended a press briefing yesterday with the Nolans and three of the show’s actors and actresses. The conversation will be fascinating to techies, gamers, and anyone who ponders the questions about who we really are deep inside, once we shake off all the rules and enter a world like Westworld, where you face no consequences and you can do everything that you’ve ever fantasized about.
,
,
“It was a chance to tell a frontier story on two levels,” said Joy. “On the one level, it’s on the frontier of science — all the more so now, when what was once pure science fiction is much closer to science without fiction, in terms of the development of AI. There’s also the Western landscape. The ability to approach that from a new angle was a playground we couldn’t resist.”
The Nolans did research into real deep learning A.I. projects such as Deep Mind, Google’s A.I. that beat the top human Go player, as well as IBM’s Watson supercomputer, which beat the world’s best human Jeopardy player.
,
,
“That’s a landmark moment,” Nolan said. “There’s a lot of money behind machine intelligence in this town.”
Of course, some companies didn’t want to be publicly associated with the conversations, because Hollywood’s tendency to associate A.I. with the apocalypse (The Terminator) or other downsides of A.I., where the robots go bad. Nolan read about consciousness, which has been the domain of philosophers as much as scientists. Nolan noted that both Larry Page of Google and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook are “on a tear to be the father of A.I.”
“For a long time, people have been talking about ideas like this, but without the technical wherewithal to re-create it or manifest it,” Joy Nolan said. “Now science is catching up with the imagination and exceeding it. It’s an iterative relationship.”
,
Source: Venture Beat