![]() Westworld is built like an incredibly advanced MMORPG that exists in physical space, with the android “hosts” serving as the non-player characters. The first season of Westworld is set entirely on the premises of the Delos corporation’s Wild West-themed amusement park, located in a remote desert and populated with lifelike androids who believe they are living in the American Southwest in the mid-1800s. But, as the series evolved, Westworld shifted its focus to a more contemporary fear for an era in which artificial intelligence (though not artificial sentience) already plays a part in our everyday lives: What if our technological advancement isn’t just playing god, but creating one? ![]() When Westworld was adapted for television over 40 years later by producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, its first season followed much the same pattern, albeit with much greater attention paid to the experiences and inner lives of the hosts. The android “hosts” of Crichton’s Wild West-themed amusement park grow beyond their programming and rebel violently against the creators who abuse them. Humanity creates a new form of life for its own gratification (and in this case, entertainment), but takes no responsibility for that life. When author and director Michael Crichton created the original Westworld film in 1973, it was very much in the 20th-century vein of a scaled-up Frankenstein problem. This week, Polygon celebrates all forms of sci-fi villainy because someone has to (or else). In space, no one can hear you scream - but that doesn't stop an evil-doer from trying. Will mankind, in its vanity and hubris, create the very thing that destroys it? Stories of a robot uprising live at the nexus of our fears of being made obsolete by technology that creates and being made extinct by technology that destroys it’s a Frankenstein for the Atomic Age. ![]() As sci-fi evolved amid the scientific quantum leaps of the 20th century, readers, viewers, and players saw this fear of “playing god” codified in countless ways, but none fit the bill quite as perfectly as the notion of the “robot apocalypse.” The term “robot” itself has its origins in a 1921 Czech science fiction stage play commenting on the dehumanizing effect of industrialization. The surprising move was reportedly part of a string of cost-cutting efforts from the studio, and while it’s tough to endorse any action that immediately resulted in hundreds of people losing their jobs, Westworld may have a stronger legacy by concluding with its fourth-season finale.Įven discounting the show’s uneven quality over the years, Westworld’s final episode, “Que Será, Será,” offers an appropriately bleak and ambiguous ending for a story that spent years pondering different permutations of the Frankenstein problem, depicting the evolution of humanity’s fear of its own creative power from the traditional concept of “playing god” to its Internet Age successor: the terrifying prospect of creating god.Īs far back as 1818, with Mary Shelley’s genre-defining novel Frankenstein, science fiction warned audiences that humanity’s technological development often outpaces its ethical development. Discovery announced that HBO series Westworld was canceled ahead of what would have been its fifth and final season.
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