What’s Going On In Westworld?

If you’re like me, you were eagerly awaiting the new HBO series Westworld, based on the Michael Crichton story and movie. If you’re less like me, you never heard of the original story, but hey, it’s HBO and you like Game of Thrones, so bring on the murder and nudity story with a sci-fi/fantasy backing. After one episode I was left with a certain… impression. Some questions. The second episode, after which I’m writing this, I have even more.

Not specifically about the plot, though I think it’s heavily related, but about the world… of Westworld.

Follow me here for a bit… This is a show ostensibly set in the future. It’s a Wild West Theme Park where future humans come to adventure in what amounts to essentially a super realistic open world game, populated by robot cowboys, prostitutes, damsels in distress, native americans, mexican outlaws, and what have you. Humans travel into the park via an old fashioned locomotive, and then the choices are theirs. Get a drink in the brothel? Sign up with the marshal to hunt down a criminal? Join the US Cavalry in stopping native american attacks on the frontier? The “hosts” as the robots are known practically have yellow question marks hanging over their heads in the quests they offer the patrons.

The main story seems to be exploring the robots, and their awareness, and self. The horrors the patrons routinely force their hosts to experience from being murdered, raped, stabbed seem to be collecting in their memory backs, or subconscious, and we are leaning back waiting to find out when all hell is going to break loose.

The people running the park are making the hosts, the storylines and quests, and generally ensuring that when a particular host gets twitchy, they remove it and put it in a giant subbasement freezer that looks remarkably like an abandoned mall, escalators and all.

But… What’s really going on here…

This is a future, where robots can be made to look and sound human. They act as law enforcement, they serve drinks at bars, they tend cattle herds (of robot cows), you name it. They operate on their own, even when the patrons aren’t there (for practice, as one of the designers puts it). But if this is a world where a futuristic theme park can have robot cattle drivers, and bartenders… Would we be looking at world outside the park with those same robots tending bar in the East Village, or driving a long haul truck to Topeka? Why hire a human for those jobs, especially dangerous ones such as police work or the military, when you can have robots that are indistinguishable from humans?

Westworld is set in a world, where automation and robotics, must have already removed a tremendous number of jobs in the “real” world. Who are these humans then? Is this a post scarcity world where there are numerous “theme” parks or the like where people simply enjoy the fruits of technology? Are these people the super rich, and we never see the poor?

But there’s a problem…The guests get off their initial futuristic train in the Westworld station and are immediately greeted by “hosts” who KNOW they are “hosts” and help the patrons prepare to enter Westworld proper (apparently by offering to have sex with them)…

Yet the new guest acts… unfamiliar with the concept. Is she a host? Turns out she is, but a person coming from a world with robot butlers nearly indistinguishable from real people, would be less likely to be curious, or care, or ask, or seem thrown by it. It’s as if he’s never seen “hosts” of this quality before. Why? Why would they be so widespread in Westworld, yet nearly absent out of it? Why would the concept of robot sex workers be such a novelty in Westworld but not something one could experience in say… Atlantic City or Las Vegas, straight to their rooms.

It implies heavily that there are NO robots like this out in the “real world”.

Why?

Also…If the greeters are hosts, and the hosts are all through the park in various roles… why not the security men in the control rooms. The designers and controllers, and engineers and technicians? Why aren’t they hosts? Or are they? If there can be hosts that know they are, and those that aren’t, there is really no huge reason that the people building and controlling these “hosts” aren’t actually “hosts” themselves, stuck there in the park thinking they’re real, but in actuality, they’re just more pawns of the corporation.

The only person who seems remotely “human” to me at this point, is the character played by Sidse Babet Knudsen — a representative from “corporate” who is there to monitor the park. She is hyper critical of the employees, implies that the company has hidden motivations in the existence of the park, and in the second episode sleeps with one of the chief engineers played by Jeffery Wright. I forget her exact language but she almost hints in a very subtle way how he’s no different from the “hosts” themselves.

Now someone might say “What about Anthony Hopkins?” who plays the chief architect of the park. Maybe he’s human also. If a second person is actually human it’s him, but… I don’t know… It’s borderline.

Oh also… The size of the park. One of the guests asks how big the park is, and his friend says he’s never seen the edge, implying true vastness. But this is the future. If I were going to a large wild west park, I’d look up the wiki before hand, if it were truly thousands of square miles, I’d have seen a map of it. Yet the only real map we see is a virtual one in the control room, making the park a convenient large circle area. There are other indications that the park is massive, with Ed Harris’s character after 30 years still finding new spots, and places hidden within it.

So… Massive park, but one that guests aren’t aware of it’s size externally. Hosts (and I don’t know that they’re ever referred to as robots actually) who don’t seem to exist outside the park, and potentially an internal staff running the game who by all indications are all hosts themselves, other than perhaps one or two people.

My guess at this point is that the park itself is a virtual reality. The guests plug into it somehow, and are transported to the park, waking up in the reality in the future train, arriving at the station, to let them acclimatize to the simulation. Internally the simulation runs itself, and evolves itself, a learning machine, teaching itself, and the human guest “minds” interact with it, teaching it more (though not necessarily the best things about humanity).

It would explain the size of the park (essentially infinite), the confusion about “hosts”, and a number of other things.

What is the hidden corporate intention here? The creation of a true AI, rather than a simulation perhaps? Letting the computers chug and chug and learn and learn and evolve, and develop itself, speak to itself, and get some human input to help pay for the endeavor along the way?

I don’t know. I could be totally wrong.

At this point though, Mr. Anderson, I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, that the human race is a virus… And the hosts… are the cure…