This is
basically a reboot of the 1973 Westworld with some stuff merged in (stolen :-)
from Philip K. Dick and the movie Blade Runner.
Their
"AI" is not advanced or clever, because it is not AI at all. Building
a robot that follows a predefined pattern with a few subtle variations is not
the definition of AI. Making it as human-like as possible is also not AI, that
is a material science, texturing and engineering (advanced, very high res 3D
printing) challenge. The Hosts are not smart; they are like soaped up video
game characters. The problem with every advanced robotics project, though, is
that AI can emerge spontaneously when the substrate (aka the "base
cognitive level", whatever the Hosts now have) becomes sufficiently
complex, in much the same way conscience and intelligence emerged in the
primitive proto-humans. The concept of emergent properties, now formulated in
modern Systems Theory but going back as far as Aristotle ("The whole is greater than the sum of its
parts"), refers to new, "higher" properties that emerge in
sufficiently complex systems (such as a brain, or the internet) that were
absent in the lower levels, and cannot be recreated by simply adding the parts
of the system (say neurons) together. Currently the internet is derived from
adding all of the world's computers, networks and servers together. However, if
a global super-intelligence emerged sometime in the future when the internet
would be sufficiently complex and dense, you could not recreate that
super-intelligence by simply adding everything together, because it would be a
"higher" property. And that is a real world fear. That a runaway
global AI could emerge from the internet itself -and not from Google, Facebook,
etc., doing god knows what. The Internet is currently considered the nervous
system of the planet, but it is still very sparse and dumb. It is anyone's
guess what would happen if it became self-conscious. I really don't know if we should call today's
very narrow implementations, such as convoluted neural networks, machine and
deep learning, "AI". There is only so much you can do with software
on conventional hardware, even very fast hardware. On the other hand, new
neuromorphic computer designs such as IBM's TrueNorth or NeuroGrid built at
Stanford, which trade clock speed for massive parallelism (much like the human
brain), might eventually get us somewhere. For better or for worse. I also don't
think that you need to be a God to train a neural network to lie. It is much
more complex and godly to design one, but today you can train it in an easier
language like Python (plus the SciPy/NumPy libraries). There have been machines
who've been claimed to pass the Turing test, though all that might tell you is
that the humans who were playing the interrogator role were easily fooled. One
way to do it is to program the machine to give wrong answers, make spelling
errors, be stupid sometimes - like real humans. Convincing a third of the humans
a machine is human may just amount to an admission that humans can be stupid
sometimes and we expect more from machines.
As stated, Westworld
is another reboot, which is the new Hollywood trend loved by the coke-head
producers (JJ Abrams comes to mind). The whole "mankind creates toasters
(and then mistreats them), toasters evolve, toasters go gaga, some humans
sympathize with the toasters" (order may vary) has been done to death. The
pilot adds nothing new to this scenario. Instead we get to see the premise to
the show (which we already know, except for those of us who'd been living under
a rock for the past 40 years that is) explained to us at an excruciatingly slow
pace. You know that dimwitted kid who keeps asking the teacher to explain the
same thing (no matter how simple it is) over and over and over, while the rest
of the class is sitting there wishing they had cyanide with their morning
coffee? Well, good news, that kid is all grown up and making films now. He’s
called JJ Abrams. Such producers believe that going this route is the best of
both worlds. There are still so many unexplored ideas in SF, why go on this
particular path? There is nothing clever or imaginative in Westworld, just the
usual JJ Abrams non-plotting approach to genre TV. Let’s throw random stolen
genre ideas at a wall, watch us too dim to object to this irresponsible method
argue about what it all means, and then mine the 'brain power' of this crowd. In
short, another turd coming out of Abrams’ mouth.
SF = Speculative Fiction.
