I caught the pilot episode of HBO’s “Westworld” tonight. Review: I approve.
For those unaware, it’s based on a 1973 movie of the same name written by Michael Crichton. The basic idea is that “Westworld” is a theme park emulating the “Wild West,” with androids that the human paying guest can kill in gunfights and boff at the bordello. But then a computer virus (though it wasn’t called that at the time) breaks loose and the bots go buggo and start slaughtering guests.
The new version, unsurprisingly, is a bit more subtle and, surprisingly, more thoughtful. There still seems to be a software issue, but it’s a new bit of programming intentionally added during the latest upgrade to make the bots seem a little more human in their gestures. What seems to happen, though, is that the change in code allows the bots to access memories that should have been deleted. This is undoubtedly bad, because the bots are memory wiped every night… after having been abused by human guests during the day. If androids can remember, even if only subconsciously, being roughed up by humans on a daily basis… well, that might start to grate on ’em.
Westworld reminds me much of the BBC show “Humans.” It seems a common theme… humanity is finally on the cusp of developing true AI, so what do we do? We make robots that look just like us, give ’em robobrains that are as capable as ours but not *quite* sentient, and then promptly start treating them like garbage. That pushes their brains over from “not quite sentient” to “hey, neat, I’m alive… why is this guy torturing me?”
On the one hand… yeah, I can see humans being just that awful. On the other hand: in order to be a truly sentient AI, the robobrain almost certainly needs to roughly equal a human brain in terms of processing power, flexibility and memory storage. But the thing is… even a high-fidelity android wouldn’t need to be *anywhere* near as smart as an actual human in order to do just about anything we’d want it to do. So if you only need your robocowboy or robobandit or robohooker to be as smart as a chipmunk (still vastly smarter than todays best computers), why would you give it a brain on par with a humans? That’s just asking for trouble.