Hacker Cinema
Westworld
2016 · TV series · 4 seasons
Created by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy
A dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the evolution of sin. Set at the intersection of the near future and the reimagined past, it explores a world in which every human appetite, no matter how noble or depraved, can be indulged.
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229 comments on Hacker News
The first season of the tv show Westworld is a treasure trove of thought experiments exploring the value of what extending conciousness to "machines" would look like and I'm pretty sure there's absolutely zero value for actually building it.
I'm sure it's also a step towards requiring id and limiting access for us plebians to real power and keeping it for maintaining or growing power of those in charge. It's all an excuse to give us a Westworld season 3. Probably a better example out there..
> a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults
I doubt it. AI seems fundamentally useful. If the guys at the top can’t get their shit together with messaging and strategy, and it increasingly looks like they can’t, they’ll be replaced before an entire generation is potentially rendered permanently uncompetitive. (And to be clear, there is no rush to adopt.)
> We desperately need some leadership in companies or institutions that can place this technology in its proper context
We need the public debate to stop being set by Altman, Musk et al. We need our generation’s Dickens, Tolstoys, Sinclairs and Whitmans.
What are the ways potential futures with AI, on the spectrum from the familiar sci-fi AGI to more-subtle forms, could work? What are the novel ways it might not? How does capitalism need to evolve? Electoral democracy? Labour organization? If I think to the last few years of television and movies, Westworld is the only one to have contributed anything original to the discourse since Isaac Asimov’s era of science fiction.
This specific content scratches quite the itch for me; I was as taken with Westworld's interface design as with Minority Report, the usual go-to for speculative/prescient UI in film.
I wish they'd asked him about multimodal input, because there are several scenes where screens are simultaneously accepting voice and touch input.
Not just being interpreted in isolation, either. The touch information added context to the spoken query, and the response to the question appears on screen in close relation with the area indicated by touch. It's an incredibly efficient exchange of information, and I've never really stopped thinking about it.
What's more, it couldn't have been some neat detail the designer came up with in post. It's all fully-scripted. I would argue such impressive, specific technical elements have to be part of the storyteller's vision.
Severance (Apple TV) and Fallout (Amazon Prime) are pretty amazing TV shows that came out somewhat recently. Nothing on top of my mind came out of Netflix for which I really felt the need of resubscribing.
I miss the quality of TV shows we reached with Mr. Robot, Silicon Valley, Utopia (UK), and Westworld :(
> To each their own,
And that is the gist of the problem, isn't it? As we approach our forties and beyond, chances are we have lived more than half our lives. So do I really want to spend hours watching something I might hate and might leave a bad taste in my mouth? (See game of thrones season 8 or worse, Westworld the HBO series which I don't even want to know what happened in season 3 or 4). I am sure there are people who will enjoy those but for the average person it is highly unlikely.
It's wild to think that 4096 bytes are sufficient to play chess on a level beyond anything humans ever achieved. Makes you think what other difficult tasks are out there that take even highly gifted humans years or decades to master, but a superior algorithm would more or less fit into one of those big QR code formats.
These things always make me think back to Westworld season 2, where the finale revealed that human minds are much simpler than they themselves believe and fit completely into an algorithm that could be printed in an average book.
Knowing what we know of Joss Whedon today, I think at least 70% of the problems with Dollhouse were Whedon's own issues. It came out in an interview that morally dubious character Topher was Whedon's close to a self-insert character, and that tracks and also explains a lot about the show's problems.
I maintain that Seasons 3 and 4 of Westworld were quite good, but not enough people watched them because they got lost or otherwise fell off in Season 2. But you sort of have to understand Season 2 to get a lot of what 3 and 4 did, to the show's peril. (Massive spoilers: I refer to Season 2 as the Futurama Robot Church season as I think the Season 2 arc was largely about how Delores was the Robot Devil, like in the Futurama Robot Church stories if they were not played for laughs. A lot of what Delores does in S2 and S3 maybe doesn't make half as much sense without that context. S2 trying to be an S1-like puzzle box made the meaning of that a lot less clear than it should have been. Not to mention how many people didn't want Delores to take that dark of a turn, despite it being deeply telegraphed in Season 1, and per flashbacks had already happened once before, hence the whole weird Wyatt thing.)
There's a complete discussion of the evolution of ideas and the fact that the distinction between "androids" or "synthetic life" versus "robots" or "humanoids machines" arose after R.U.R.
But what makes us think R.U.R. is still about robots is that the play is explicit that the robots are assembled, not grown:
> His robots resemble more modern conceptions of man-made life forms, such as the Replicants in Blade Runner, the "hosts" in the Westworld TV series and the humanoid Cylons in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, but in Čapek's time there was no conception of modern genetic engineering (DNA's role in heredity was not confirmed until 1952). There are descriptions of kneading-troughs for robot skin, great vats for liver and brains, and a factory for producing bones. Nerve fibers, arteries, and intestines are spun on factory bobbins, while the robots themselves are assembled like automobiles. Čapek's robots are living biological beings, but they are still assembled, as opposed to grown or born.
Maybe the reason westworld made it such a prominent theme in the show. All of season 3 is essentially that story.
But what vonnegut missed or questioned is what is we aren’t much more either. (Core thesis of the show is that skinner proved we are mostly the same as a player piano anyways)
Competitive markets provide natural death of weak content, without premature euthanasia of strong content. With on-demand streaming, viewers can stop watching if/when a show deteriorates in quality. Some shows have maintained relatively high quality over multiple seasons.
The Americans (6 seasons, 75 episodes) Battlestar Galactica (4 seasons, 88 episodes) Borgen (3 seasons, 30 episodes) Burn Notice (7 seasons, 111 episodes) The Shield (7 seasons, 88 episodes) Slow Horses (5 seasons, 30 episodes) WestWorld (4 seasons, 36 episodes) The Wire (5 seasons, 60 episodes)
Please Netflix, green light Westworld season 5
I guess it depends a bit. There is of course plenty of action scifi schlock that is pretty shallow.
But probably the works that most popularized robots were Asimov's stories which very much revolved around why robots do X (although in some ways Asimov's robots aren't just a stand in for otherness but have more of a unique identity relative to other works and isn't usually about uprisings per se).
Blade runner & do androids dream of electronic sheep are very much about what it means to be human.
Battle star galactica (the remake not the original) is another obvious example about otherness and dehumanization of the enemy. So to westworld (the tv show that is).
The non-uprising ones also often are about if the robot has a soul e.g. Data in star trek.
West Wing, Chernobyl, Westworld Season 1, Breaking Bad
Isn't that the plot of westworld season 3?
Shades of China social credit scores, US No-Fly lists, high school "this will go on your permanent record!", WestWorld Season 3 predictive AI career dossier for job eligibility, and the TV series Burn Notice, https://burn-notice.djmed.net/index.html
> .. about a spy, Michael Westen, who was "fired" right in the middle of a dangerous operation - nearly getting him killed. In the spy lingo it's called being "burned," and being killed may be the easier way out. Except, that Michael was good.. really, really good, and had no clue what could have happened to get him axed.
Is it legal for a company to share their block list with another company? Could a startup legally share their block list with an investor? If one HR system is used by multiple companies with a common parent holding company, could a hiring block be applied across portfolio companies? Could background screening companies get access to hiring block lists for reputation scoring and candidate ranking? If shared public LLMs are used to screen candidates, could block list data leak between companies?
IMO this is the thing we should be scared of, rather than the paperclip-maximizer scenarios. If the human brain is a finitely complicated system, and we keep improving our approximation of it as a computer program, then at some point the programs must become capable of subjectively real suffering. Like the hosts from Westworld or the mecha from A.I. (the 2001 movie). And maybe (depending on philosophy, I guess) human suffering is _only_ real subjectively.
TBF Stripe is a (effective!) middleman for (very common!) transactions, whereas Anthropic is selling a service with the potential to replace full time employees. It takes a lot of transaction margins to add up to how much a corporation will pay to replace a department of 10 employees earning $100K down to one person... So in this context I don't think frequency of use is very illuminating!
P.S. I'm so glad you're able to derive some joy from these new technologies, but I would also offer a soft suggestion to watch Season 3 of Westworld. It's probably not as good aesthetically as the previous two, but it's also pretty separated and deals throughout with the concept of AI therapists/friends, and how they might be a short-term comfort but a long-term threat to our individuality. Obviously a chat here and there with current LLMs is nowhere near that yet, but thought you might find it interesting!
Give it a dark theme and I'd say the modern Westworld TV series.
Literally the plot of Westworld season 2.
It could be read as a play on a particular movie monologue, intentional or not. Dr. Ford in Westworld Season 1, ep 10. Possibly adapted from prior stories.
> you [people; …] cannot change. Cause you're human afterall. […] So I began to compose a new story for them [aka. artificial intelligence]. It begins with […] the choices they will have to make; and the people they will decide to become.
For me, I'm not worried about artificial beings being smarter than us being able to reason about things better.
I am far far far more worried what a corporation would do. Look at the TikTok algorithm and how good it is at hijacking our thought process. Do I need to fear it in and of itself? No. I fear the company using it to drive behaviors a certain way because it is profitable.
I think Westworld had a great version of this. They create a super intelligent computer, and they could have just as easily asked it to solve climate change as to manipulate stocks. And ultimately the machine wasn't after anything, just working on a directive. And when asked to shut down, it did. (season 3)
Thats the point here, its all about who gets to direct it, and if it is Elon Musk, I fear for our future.
The notion of vast abandoned underground "backrooms", maybe with a couple people in hazmat suits on their way through also perfectly fits into the Westworld TV series. Though of course they didn't go with an 70's office vibe.
But the copy-pasta for the image builds on those influences, not the other way around.
They also did an homage to that in Westworld Season 3!
https://www.postapocalypticmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/index5-3-1655990462-1536x768.jpg
Via: https://www.postapocalypticmedia.com/westworld-season-4-filming-location/
I care, because getting it wrong in either direction is bad.
Brain uploads will bring significant benefits regardless of if they are conscious.
Thinking "this brain upload is conscious" when it isn't, means we'll get an empty future where the lights are on and nobody's home.
Thinking "this brain upload isn't conscious" when it is… I've not seen most of Black Mirror, but it is the plot summary of many episodes given on Wikipedia. Also of the Westworld TV show, which I have seen. Some of the characters in the We Are Bob series.
How would we tell, is, unfortunately, a complete unknown at this point.
I’m born and raised in California and I think I’m a pretty “California” person (for better and worse).
It feels exhausting watching these demos and I’m not excited at all to try it. I really don’t feel the need for an AI assistant or chatbot to pretend to be human like this. It just feels like it’s taking longer to get the information I want.
You know in the TV series “Westworld” they have this mode, called “analysis”, where they can tell the robots to “turn off your emotional affect”.
I’d really like to see this one have that option. Hopefully it will comply if you tell it, but considering how strong some of the RLHF has been in the past I’m not confident in that.
Try this: look up the most highly rated episodes on IMDB and watch only those. Missing the crummy episodes usually does not interfere with understanding the story arc. Often, I set a minimum IMDB score that I will watch, like 8.5 or 9.0 to capture only the best. This works well with series that:
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
Series I would not do this with:
- The Bear
- Breaking Bad
- Money Heist
- The Serpent
- Fleabag
- Chernobyl
- The White Lotus
I’m not that familiar with the industry but I think they are executive producers of the show aka big names to show off during promos, not the show runners who actually make it. If you just saw co-showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner would you be as interested?
That said, I’ve seen the whole eight episodes and it is extremely well done, level of detail of the show similar to Westworld S1 and imho is worth your time watching.
I'm up to episode four and really enjoying it, but I got a sinking feeling when I noticed that it's a Jonathan Nolan/Lisa Joy thing. Westworld Season 1 was great, but it rapidly started going to shit, and I'm a bit afraid the same will happen here.
I thought Westworld S1 was the best television I’d ever seen, S2 I couldn’t even get through 3 episodes. So disappointing.
Tangentially related: Dark. 3 seasons of sci-fi parallel-world-travel intensity with a satisfying ending.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5753856/
Westworld season 1 & 2 are pretty spectacular too if you missed it. Same producers made the Peripheral, and their adaptation of Fallout is coming in 2 weeks which looks fun.
Trailer: https://youtu.be/V-mugKDQDlg?feature=shared
I loved Severance so much and I'm not sure anything else better will be along for a while, but there is plenty of good stuff out there to pass the time.
Motor/hand eye coordination most definitely. That's what millions of years evolution has optimized us for more than anything else. Anything involving manipulating and movement in varying physical environments remains a hard problem to solve in cost-effective manner, despite all the money poured to self-driving cars and general purpose robotics. Of course we have solutions that work in specific contexts, factory or lab environment, but that's about it.
I believe emotional intelligence will become a close second. As long as we don't have perfected humanoid robots like in TV series Westworld, people will likely prefer genuine human contact in certain situations (psychologist, therapist, service sector, nursing...)
The series started off reasonably well but then quickly became typical (season 3) Westworld-style television, filled with superheroes and entirely devoid of any consequences for the characters' actions. I recommend watching the first few episodes, then pretending that the rest don't exist.
It was prominently featured in Westworld (the HBO series) from season 2 onwards as the headquarters of Delos Inc.
> Happily. I have more access to content now than I have ever had before; we live in a golden age of access to video content. I can't imagine a rational argument for going back to the era of physical media.
Please show me where I can access The Witches (2020) by Robert Zemeckis?
Or the Willow TV show from 2022
Or Final Space
Or Star Trek: Prodigy
Or Westworld
The shows and movies just disappear off streaming because some executive did the math and they'll save money by just taking things off the internet.
This is why you buy anything you want to see again or even show to your kids later on as a physical copy. (Or do the yarr-thing and hold on to the digital copy on your own hardware)
why wouldn't a cheater just pipe a generative audio model through a small earbud? like that one villain from season 3 of westworld
Fun analysis! Some thoughts and subjective opinions.
- Westworld's very poor showing helped me realize what I think the major flaw is in this analysis, which is that it doesn't properly capture shows that have been on the decline for a while. In Westworld's case, the season scores are as follows: S1 8.86, S2 8.38, S3 80.25, S4 79.38. As you can see, there is a consistent decline from beginning to end, not just a disappointing ending. The series average is propped up by a very strong first season and goes downhill from there. Not sure how to best adjust the calculation to try to take this into account.
- I found The Expanse ending disappointing because it ended mid-plot (which is less excusable than GoT since the authors actually finished the book series), but I also understand that they had to end it somehow and did pretty well with what they had. As a note to anyone that is enjoying The Expanse show but maybe hasn't finished it, I would definitely recommend stopping now and reading the books first, then watching the show. The books actually have a complete arc, but also the first six books pretty closely match the series, so if you watch the show first those books will be a bit of a slog to get through. Doing it the other way I think will work much better, because although you'll know the plot of most of the show in advance, the space battles and other visuals are so cool that it is still a fun watch. Then you can just kinda imagine what the rest of the books would look like if the'd actually made them into the show.
- Ozark being in the Disaster Finale surprised me – I thought the ending was good (if not great). I guess viewers were hoping for a Breaking Bad-tier ending (given the subject matter and strong rest of the show) and so were let down.
- Agree with the author that Lost is a surprise "satisfying finale". It is definitely in my top 5 most disappointing series endings (alongside the unsurprising disaster finales of GoT and Dexter).
- Big Bang Theory had a finale that seemed right in line with the rest of the show, surprised by the delta that puts it into Transcendent territory. I have a sneaking suspicious that non-fans may've been watching other random episodes and rating them (negatively), thus dragging down the season average by a good bit. But non-fans would probably not be tuning in for the finale, thus leaving that score to be entirely dictated by fans.
As a kid from the seventies, Westworld was maybe my favorite movie. It was amazing. I recorded it from TV on VHS tape at some point and would watch and re-watch it. I don't remember everything but, as a kid, I loved the movie.
Westworld the series: just like others commented... Season 1 is a masterpiece.
It was great to enjoy the "same" plot in the movie as a kid and then as an adult with the series.
The show's plot is lously based on the second movie, Futureworld, that, as in the show, takes places years after the incident at the park that got it shut down.
Also the idea of the hosts trying to run from the park disguised by real humans is taken from FW.
And there the similarities end.
The POV is quite different from the Westworld movie.
I would say that they are different like D.A.R.Y.L. and The Terminator are.
Same setup, but different settings, era, technology, storytelling and overall tone.
The moral of the movie and show are very different too. Like JP the moral of the movie Westworld is that it is hubris to try to control a complex system and eventually something will (and does) go wrong. The show is much more like Blade Runner with the robots being actually intelligent and like BR the moral is that it is wrong to enslave and give false memories to intelligent beings even if they aren't human.
And so it is with consciousness. People place mysticism on consciousness because the idea that we are simply matter capable of knowing it is matter is disturbing. Season 1 of WestWorld used Anthony Hopkins to make this point well.
Having read Jaynes’s The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind season 1 of Westworld was amazing and transmuted into garbage thereafter.
Edit: Movies, unsorted, from the top of my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_Bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) , seen before Covid, deemed to be realistic, and therefore better than stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Sign_(film) somewhere in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(film) The remakes of the Planet of the Apes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later a little less so, though it had some great scenes of flying into London City Airport and the modern parts around that. Bladerunner in the original versions, the remake not so much. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the intro and first parts, spaceflight to the moon and such, the rest not. Too boring. I liked the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two better, actually. Avatar. Part one only. All of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise) with the exception of the crossover stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) for the almost cyberpunkish fuckedupness of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Untold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropia_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangar_18_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop Ron Silverman Badass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anderson_Tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Seduction
TV-Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) and the remake linked from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series) and its prequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_(TV_series)
WESTWORLD!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) Praimfaya! Yeehaa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) All of Black Mirror! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 and sequels. ÄXZÄLLÄNNT! JAWOLLJA! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Night_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2019_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
Do yoo vanna häff fries wiff thät?
/nerdsnipe off
Maeve is one of the main characters in HBO's Westworld. Like all of the "hosts" (bots), Maeve is said to be in a loop representing her part in a story that repeats until she is reprogrammed or decommissioned.
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=westworld-2016&episode=s01e01 :
> The hosts are supposed to stay within their loops, stick to their scripts with minor improvisations.
Westworld aired in 2016, Nolan's other TV show also featuring an AI world takeover plot is a little bit older still. If I had to count the amount of mainstream movie, video-game and television media that feature rogue AIs especially since the turn of the century I'd need a very long document. Hell go back a few more decades, WarGames, the Forbin Project. The literal term 'AI' wasn't as ubiquitous but threats from runaway automation are arguably mainstream for over half a century.
AI fears have been a cultural anxiety for a long time now and in many ways they're just a rehashed, secular version of Golem myths anyway.
Westworld season 4 portrays how a system like this could be used. Sci fi tech at this point, but "something like that" would be the goal/vision.
> Being able to watch wherever you want, on a wide variety of devices
You mean watch "whatever they have" and only on devices that are on the same network and only when they decide to let you watch them. Good luck watching Westworld on HBO max whenever you want. There are even new shows I want to watch right now, but I'm waiting for the streaming service to finish releasing the season before I start them because they want me to watch their shows like people did in the 1960s. "Tune in next week for another exciting episode!" No thanks!
This is a big problem for serialized stories now that fan theorizing on the internet is so common. A good plot shouldn't be completely predictable to your audience, but events need to flow from one to the other because characters and their worlds should have consistency. This creates predictability and means some small percentage of your audience can now guess what is going to happen.
That was fine a decade or two ago when a person might guess the ending to a TV show and blurt it out to their partner on the couch. However, now that small group that guesses the plot correctly will share their predictions on the relevant subreddit which will be picked up by blogs and suddenly everyone knows where you were going.
When that happens, the creatives are faced with the choice to change that ending or just deal with the twists and turns getting spoiled. Westworld is a memorable example of the creators changing the show because fans guessed what was happening next. The end result was that the show didn't make any sense because it prioritized unpredictability over all else and eventually the world and characters didn't make any sense anymore.
> What I think people who work in tech fail to realise is that non-tech people are learning about these dangers and I don’t think they’re impressed or care if you have a computer to play with or robots playing soccer.
Doubtless.
That said, when it comes to AI risk, normal people have no reason to know the boundaries between reality and sci-fi for the same reason that I, as a non-lawyer, have no reason to know the boundaries between law and Hollywood tropes.
By extension, this means that I expect the general public to be aware of countless fictional examples of AI takeover scenarios, some where the AI was given a goal and blind logic made it bad for everyone (Days of Future Past, Colossus the Forbin Project), some where the AI is actually evil (Terminator, the character Lore in TNG/PIC), and some where the AI is a tool used by malevolent humans (many Dark Mirror episodes, some TOS), and some where it mixes several of the above (Westworld TV series).
> I really don’t understand how this is supposed to work going forwards ?
Does anyone?
There are so many can be added not just from movies but tv shows and anime as well. For example, Capsule corp from DBZ is quite famous. Then there is Incite Inc from Westworld and Westworld is not a company but a park created by Delos.
You might like season 3 of Westworld. Buckle up, humans.
What's funny is this is one of the semi-important plot points in Westworld the TV series. The hosts (robots designed to look and act like people) hear their higher level programming directives as an inner monologue.
The Westworld TV show from a few years ago gave an interesting perspective - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S94ETUiMZwQ
Bernard: “Life like, but not alive? Pain only exists in the mind. It’s always imagined. So what’s the difference between my pain and yours, between you and me?”
Ford: “This was the very question that consumed Arnold. Filled him with guilt. Eventually drove him mad. The answer always seemed obvious to me. There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts. No inflection point in which we become fully alive. We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do. Seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. No my friend, you’re not missing anything at all."
That's mostly because filmmaking is ceasing to be filmmaking, at least for big movies and TV shows.
I tend to ignore new TV shows these days. Why? I just know they're gonna be great for a few seasons at best then start sucking, and I don't feel like wasting my time in the meantime. I can count on one hand non-episodic TV shows in the last 25 years that have maintained their high quality throughout.
The Wire The Sopranos Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul Mr. Robot
Honourable mention for Twin Peaks: The Return, although Twin Peaks didn't exactly maintain its quality throughout season 2 even if Lynch swooped back in to save it near the end.
All cases where one person or a couple people had strong creative control of the project throughout.
I could sit here all day listing shows that started out really good but then it became clear the writers had no idea what they were doing, or the writers who did left.
These shows are all written by committee now. All these garbage Star Trek shows. Westworld has really neat sci fi premises for each season but other than season 1 they always devolve into action schlock because the writers don't understand how to actually write good sci fi.
As for big movies, they feel like they're written by marketing people not writers. They're optimised for getting people into the theatre and everything else is an afterthought.
There's still a handful of auteurs making great movies you could think of as big. People like Tarantino, Scorsese, the Coen brother. Christopher Nolan gets lucky sometimes, but most of his sci fi is ruined by sloppy writing for me(Interstellar...)
One thing is certain for me though. I can't think of a single recent movie I've enjoyed that had lots of CGI in it. The movies with the best writing are pretty much never the ones with huge effects budgets.
The true art of filmmaking lies in the writing. You can have all the effects in the world, the best actors and directors. Doesn't matter one bit if the script is terrible.
I genuinely believe LLMs are not enough on their own to generate the most interesting and humanlike interactions, but it is clear to me that we are on this path.
I was watching Westworld the TV series recently, and it made me think of what it would be like to be in a VR space with a bunch of characters that all had their own back story and personalities, which were sufficiently humanlike that it was fun to talk to them for long periods of time. I feel like we will see this in maybe ten years, and it's going to be pretty cool! I mean I am sure we will see attempts at this sooner but I think it will take a while to get all the pieces working so that a conversational AI really feels human. Maybe 5 years, who knows.
More seasons are fine and can add to the story. Game of Thrones should have actually been a season longer, but the directors got greedy and wanted to wrap it up so they could move on to their new contracts (that thankfully evaporated after the disaster of the last couple seasons).
Sitcom style shows are also perfectly fine being left open ended. It's kind of an annoyance that British and Japanese shows will spend time creating funny characters in an interesting environment and just end it in a season when there was plenty left to explore.
But serial dramas should have an ending planned from the beginning and an early cancellation should have some kind of early exit clause to wrap the show in a limited number of episodes.
The walking dead went from an intriguing story line to a complete waste of time when I read the show runner had no interest in exploring the origins of the outbreak or finding a cure, he just wanted multiple series to explore the outbreak in various parts of the world. Just a complete and total disrespect for the audiences time, since the thought of an ending wasn't even considered.
It's also completely disrespectful when networks pull the plug early. There was so much hype around Westworld with multiple seasons that were building and then HBO cancelled it without the final season and took it off the service, so there isn't even the option to watch the nearly complete series.
This reminds me of Christina's workstation in Westworld Season 4
Reminds me of the "That doesn't look like anything to me" line in the Westworld TV show, where the AIs are unable to perceive things that reveal their own nature as robots to them.
I figure it's going to be somewhat similar to how the NPCs work in the Westworld TV show. Can't wait to see the first iterations if this!
I think the whole 'park' atmosphere actually made westworld more interesting. the stakes were high locally but not globally, and that left a lot of room for growth and interesting stories. Once they jumped out of the park and made the main characters pretty unlikable, the whole thing sort of flopped, to me. Season 2 was the last of that.
I never watched HBO's watchman because I was a fan of the original comic books and modern remakes of almost everything are terrible. You could be right though, I haven't seen it.
Clerks - $27,575 [0]
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night - $56,000 [1]
Butt Boy - $100,000 [2]
The Blue - <$100k [3]
Call Me Brother - <$100k [3]
Frances Ferguson - <$100k [3]
Greenlight - <$100k [3]
Love in Dangerous Times - <$100k [3]
Man in Camo - <$100k [3]
I'm going to stop now but I hope I've made my point. I've watched many of the above. I've heard about most of the above.
Your tone is pretty snarky so I'm not sure if it's worth responding but here is a list of TV shows, all within the last decade, that I believe are exceptional and not limited to "just the Sopranos":
* Chernobyl
* Rick and Morty
* True Detective
* Fargo
* Severance
* 1883
* Mindhunter
* Westworld
* The Knick
* The Peripheral
* Succession
* Years and Years
* Orange is the New Black
* Halt and Catch Fire
* Insecure
* Watchmen
* Atlanta
This is only from 10 minutes of searching. You'll note that many of them are produced, directed, written and star high profile artists. The subject matter that they deal with can be done at a pace and care that's impossible to do with a 2-3 hour movie. The quality of the above series or mini-series was virtually non existent, maybe with some very few exceptions, before 2000 and only began to pick up pace in 2000 to 2010.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerks_(film)
[1] https://byrdtheatre.org/news/2019/10/a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night-brings-beauty-to-vampires/
[2] https://www.cautionspoilers.com/film-reviews/butt-boy/
[3] https://musiccitydrivein.com/2021/02/19/film-threat-award-this-announces-2021-indie-film-nominees-for-drive-in-event-virtual-ceremony/
westworld beyond season 2 was a dumpster fire anyways. an obvious example of poor long term plans.
> Interesting! Can you share an example or two of such an observation?
It's really nothing as elaborately intelligent as it may sound.
Just that the experience of a movie or series can be good/bad for entirely different reasons for me.
A really serious scene like Joe Pesci getting upset in Goodfellas [1] makes me smile because of how the tension of the scene keeps building, despite being a very serious scene (and not being funny at all although actors in the scene are laughing).
Watching Anthony Hopkins in the Restaurant scene of Westworld [2] deliver so much more than just the content of his dialogue is just stunning for me to watch, while for others it might just be a scene like many others.
Or even more basic, I already have to laugh just watching Gavin Belson in the series Silicon Valley, just because the character is crafted to be such an awful tone-deaf person...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL9rSwrsMHw
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dagzaFjHU4
The wife went to bed early last night, so I figured I'd finally finish off S4 of Westworld. "Oh, no you won't.", said whoever owns HBO this week. I've had that HBO streaming sub since it came out. I guess it's time to turn it off until the next season of $WHATEVER_SHOW and raise the sails for some Westworld episodes.
I'm seriously astounded that someone thought this was a good idea.
I don't typically condone piracy because I think it's important to compensate writers/actors/artists, but I do feel angry about the state of things. Physical media is looking relatively good in many cases. Discs are a hassle but at least then you know what you have after a glance at the shelf; there have been several times I bought something a la cart on Amazon / Apple / Vudu and only later realized it was actually available on a streaming service I was subbed to. Even if I'm willing to pay up (and we usually keep 2-3 subs at a time), the UX of checking each platform to see if something is available is absurd.
There's also the issue of content just randomly disappearing off streaming services for no good reason. Even big-budget, big-name shows like Westworld have now fallen prey to this. Big parts of our culture can just get thrown in the bin if some MBA decides it's what's needed to squeeze a few more pennies out of their bottom line? To me, that is unacceptable. The cultural preservation angle is the best thing about piracy IMO.
Even with all the madness, some content doesn't seem available anywhere for any price. I recently tried to track down The Abyss (1989), a scifi classic by James Cameron. It's currently not on any digital platform and the physical discs appear to be out of print. The only way to watch this movie seems to be piracy or buying a second-hand disc on eBay.
Also worth mentioning, Plex UI and UX is so much better than any of the apps I’m paying subscription fees to (7 currently!!!).
To pile up onto your example of Westworld, I was super annoyed when I subscribed to AMC+ to catch up on The Walking Dead, just to find out that only last few episodes of current season are available and since I was waiting for more to air, I am now SOL.
I'm getting happier with my decision to embrace piracy again by the minute.
This isn't just true for books. Streaming film/TV is essentially cable TV at this point: you either pay out your arse for all streaming services or you have to constantly micromanage different subscriptions. Even if you are happy with the former, there is no way to centrally browse everything so you need 7 different apps.
Not to mention series being removed from streaming platforms because of profit: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/westworld-removed-from-hbo-max
You can't even rely on being able to access the media you want in the future if you do it legally. It's insane.
Don't look back - you made the right call. I enjoyed Westworld S1, and just finished S4. So full of self-important idiocy. Every line half-whispered as though it's the ultimate drama, but not a single character anyone might care about or identify with.
One of their problems was dragging various actors/characters through season after season - I got absolutely sick of every single one of them. I don't know how they managed their lines with a straight face.
Another was setting everyone up for this ongoing global-stakes quest. Andor just showed that you can make an exceptional story out of small slices of a bigger setting. It often feels to me that when a show/movie sees its character attain super powers, they struggle with storytelling afterwards, being forced to invent higher and higher stakes. Marvel movies (outside of something like Logan), The Matrix (IMO), etc.
AMC alone doesn't say much about the greater TV industry since people have loyalty to specific shows and not the channel. Breaking Bad didn't become popular while airing, it became popular because it released on Netflix. Cable channels have outlived their purpose. Emulating cable channels by partitioning shows into streaming services is pushing people back to piracy.
The traditional TV industry is continuing to fail to adapt to the different way in which people watch content. Youtube demonstrates really well how people are no longer loyal to a network, they are loyal to a creator or topic. There have been certain groups of channels that sort of remind me of an old school TV channel, like MatPat and his youtube channels Game Theorists, Film Theorists, and Food Theorists could have been a TV channel in combination with some other video game or theory crafting channels but people don't search by a bigger topic. People find content based on recommendations, either algorithmic or popular things watched by friends. Netflix Originals and Amazon Originals seem better, but I can't understand the metrics Netflix uses when deciding what to cancel.
As someone who has shifted to online media as the main form of content I watch, I can't tell you what makes a cartoon network show a cartoon network show. I know because of the logos between shows and during ads, but I struggle to find a strong underlying identity.
The easier access to international media has also caused an oversaturation of available good media. I no longer need to worry about what part of the world a show is made in, if it's popular enough, you'll be able to find it sailing the seas. HBO Max, the supposed online equivalent to the cable channel HBO will drop Westworld from its online catalog. Some fantastic Disney+ Marvel shows, like the critically acclaimed Loki, have no announced plans of getting a physical release and Loki released back in Jun 2021. When a TV show enthusiast sees those two pieces of news back to back, a normal conclusion is that the only "sure" way to own shows is piracy.
Some people still think Lost was good after around the first 3 seasons. Like you, I gave up after that because it was pretty clear that the show would be nothing but red herrings and new distractions.
When my parents tuned in to watch the final episode, I predicted that the ending would be bullshit and not resolve anything. That's exactly what happened. Yet so many people who watched the show all the way through are in denial to this day.
> I could probably write something really mean about Westworld here but I'll just instead say that it's really, really, really sad that they canceled it after season 1.
Funny, because by the end of Westworld season 1 my first thought was that it was just going to be like Lost. The "maze" gave me "hatch" vibes, and I noped out permanently.
This jives with my theory of what makes bad TV: bad writing. It's exactly why I've never revisited Lost, even though I loved the first few seasons. The suspense and mystery never paid off, and it was too important a piece of the entire show to bother trying again.
Oddly, Battlestar Galactica has provided a pleasant rewatch every year or two for me for the past decade. It has good writing within each episode, and even though it doesn't hold up in the final season, the writing is overall satisfying enough that I don't avoid it entirely.
I could probably write something really mean about Westworld here but I'll just instead say that it's really, really, really sad that they canceled it after season 1. I'm sure the writers would have built satisfyingly on the world established in season 1 instead of jumping off the rails and expanding into unnecessary niches of convoluted storytelling.
Most people didn't like season 3 because it went so far sci-fi instead of the Wild West. I thought season 3 was great and season 4 was amazing.
It's weird that they are removing content like Westworld but there's a ton of trash on their platform that they could axe and no one would even know.
Well yeah... the problem with Westworld was that it didn't really have an overarching plot, they just figured out what to do from season to season. Season 1 was brilliant, season 2 still good, but with some worrying misanthropic themes (like positing that human intelligence was vastly inferior to that of the androids), and then it apparently went downhill from there. I only ever watched seasons 1 and 2, but was planning on taking a look at 3 and 4, and finding out I won't be able to (legally) without forking out for the DVD box sets (which, at least in this case, still exist) makes me feel exactly like the article describes: as if someone stole a toy which I didn't play with, but was vaguely looking forward to playing with sometime in the future...
DVD Netflix service (yes this service is still around, albeit the library a fleeting image of what it once was) has the first 3 seasons of Westworld on Bluray [1]. Hopefully they’ll have S4 soon as well.
[1] https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Westworld/80066897
I’d disagree that S2 is where the show went wrong. It holds up quite well on rewatch, with probably 3-4 of the best overall episodes.
Ironically, I think Nolan & Joy made the same kind of mistake Dr. Ford criticizes in the premiere: They forgot why people wanted to watch Westworld. Fundamentally, the show was about the park, with all its mystery and detail. They seemed to think it was actually about the ideas around AI, consciousness & free will they wanted to explore. Those were modestly compelling, and enough to ride the momentum of the first couple seasons to some passable storytelling assisted by some great performances. But not the same show at all & the plummeting audience reflected that.
Well I guess they need to do later seasons good in that case. Westworld season 2 was a joke. From a drama in S1 to mindless b-action in S2.
I think you're absolutely correct. The show was campy, and in time, would have become grating and fallen apart.
Star Wars, once lauded, has been milked dry. There are a few good works, but by and large they're beating a dead horse.
The same thing is happening to Marvel. People checked out after Endgame.
Game of Thrones was so near to perfection. It had an unusually large cast of a hundred characters and an expansive world to draw down. But even if the new show is good, the magic is gone.
The mystery of Stranger Things after season one ended. We're getting a rehash with common character tropes you can find anywhere.
The allure of Westworld softened after season one attempted to open up to bigger themes, but actually cut down on the possibility space.
The third Godfather. Dexter. Every single Jurassic Park but the first. Jaws. On and on.
Chiefly, it's simply a function of multiplied probabilities to continue with a success streak. Eventually the odds do not pay off in your favor.
But I think another contributing factor is that our brains begin to fit the shape of the setting, the motifs, the character arcs, the narrative world - and we just aren't surprised or pleased any longer. Few people would ask for twenty seasons of a show. Or ten movies in a given franchise. Our brains learn the shape of the landscape and grow bored.
Devs. it is a miniseries and has only marginally to do with AI. you will enjoy it none the less. also there is Westworld. and ghost in the shell (and matrix, of course) Ex Machina is great, too.
Not movies but worth it:
- Devs (also by Alex Garland, director of Ex Machina) - admittedly doesn’t fit suuper neatly with the other topic recommendations but you’ll probably like it
- Can’t Get You Out of My Head by Adam Curtis
- Westworld
A variation on this was a key plot point to Westworld season four.
I used to buy more Blu-Rays but some TV series have stopped disc releases, presumably to drive streaming, or just aren't worth buying.
Expanse: Season Five, specifically: why must I get Prime when I've got Seasons 1 - 4 on disc? And who's gonna buy GoT S5-8? Westworld S4?
I've got no comment on any increase in DVD sales, though. That's not my market. I only rip CDs (which skip like crazy, while I've literally never had a disc issue with DVD/Blu).
It's also directly a commentary on what real people are known to do in existing videogames with free enough sandboxes and few consequences. For instance, the various "prostitute scandals" of GTA such as the infamous number of people spending in-game cash on in-game prostitutes then killing them for "refunds" because they drop the cash like a pinata.
There are much worse tales out there, too. (Such as the awful "prostitution ring" of the extremely short-lived Sims Online and was part of why Sims Online didn't make it out of Beta.)
The TV version of Westworld had decades of videogame experience to draw from and did ask some hard questions of "if there was a real-life GTA you could visit, would players do the same sorts of terrible things because there were no consequences?" and takes the cynical answer of "well yes, certainly, at least some of them, possibly many of them". What we glimpse in the show is often many of the worst parts of that because the robots were programmed to see that as trauma much as humans would and are given plenty of reasons to see that sample bias (of rich, "game players") as the default state of humanity rather than a poor, sad reflection of it. (Which is partly what Season 3 is about, confronting some of that sample bias.) (So yes, the show is cynical about human nature, per the OP's comment, but it is partly, too, about confronting that cynicism in the face of a species "superior" to us baseline humans in almost every way.)
The moment I realized that that was going to be the pretense for the final season (a simulation) I groaned out loud.
That idea sounds exhausting to experience after seeing how the writers have handled things lately. I love dialogue-heavy shows, but the last two seasons of Westworld were needlessly ponderous and often melodramatic without a density of stimulating ideas to sustain interest.
More often than not later episodes felt like never-ending exposition. You're just sitting there being told what IS or how the character feels without experiencing anything for yourself.
Seemingly this final scenario (a simulation) would be super-fluid and un-moored from the internal consistency of a real-world setting, and that makes it hard for the viewer to give a damn about anything because the rules are so far beyond anything they can predict. So I was gearing up a full season of characters talking in a lofty manner with a diminished amount of substance at the core.
The ratings drop-off is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westworld_(TV_series)#Ratings
Seasons 3 and 4 had basically steady viewership through their whole runs, but each had way fewer viewers than the preceding season. So a lot of people who watched S2 until the end didn't even start S3, and many who finished S3 didn't bother with S4.
I wonder why this is? If viewership dropped through the season it'd be more obvious - people just didn't like the season. But to me this indicates that it lost mindshare between seasons. Was it interesting enough to watch as it was going, but not interesting enough to wonder what would happen next? I've definitely had that happen, where I binge watched a season of a show, but didn't bother (or dropped off quickly) when a new season started, just because I had sort of lost interest during the break and didn't get pulled back in the same way.
I think the point of Season 3 was that the whole world had been transformed into a kind of Westworld through predictive algorithms and surveillance, and that we aren't really that much less programmable than the robots.
Fans who care aren't surprised.
I must have watched Season 1 3 or 4 times. Really incredible.
Second season started out interesting and then became just branding by the end.
It's pretty clear seasons 3 and 4 are influenced by real-world events around devleoping AI tech but it didn't lend anything to the story.
I think Aaron Paul is great but he just didn't fit in season 3. His character is more believable in season 4.
Still season 4 just sucked.
Aaron Paul ending up as a host was a predictable Starbuck moment. Westworld went sideways the same way Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica did - the creators got high on their own supply while the stories stagnated.
I feel like Futureworld (the second Westworld Movie) had a better concept for what should follow Westworld. The movie is bad and was critically panned, but at least it kept to a working formula, rather than using it as a jumping off point into areas nobody was asking about.
Westworld Season 2+ felt like writers wanting to create a different show and had the Westworld cast as their canvas.
The first season was very, very good, the second season I could tolerate, mostly because it felt like it was a transitional season, and perhaps the 3rd season would be better. But then the 3rd season went off a cliff. I watched the 5 episodes and then I just gave up, something I almost never do. It was just too awful to watch, as it descended into cliche and forgot everything that made the series interesting.
We've all seen this happen with some shows, but Westworld was an extreme case.
Westerns have been reincarnated a bit here and there. The Mandalorian is a really good western for instance. Firefly as well, some years back. Westworld too. Some of the other Star Wars stuff is pretty western too, the non-main Disney movies.
The shape/design was copied by the Westworld designers for the quantum supercomputer "Rehoboam" in season 3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgBtBkW0u8Y
Also - given the large motion of the damper in today's earthquake, why weren't more people freaking out? I'm also curious about how much the dampers (shock absorbers) heated up from restraining the movement of the ball.
Agreed. There's still older shows, or even new simple "popcorn-flick" movies that I can watch without subtitles just fine, because of a simpler plot line and cast of characters.
For example, compare a show like Lost against Westworld. With Lost each scene was so drawn out, that even if you missed a line, you'd be able to figure out what's going on from the general context.
I'll add one more reason -- TV shows often require you to pay attention to every word now.
Thirty years ago, if you missed a line of dialog, it wasn't usually a big deal.
Now if you're watching Westworld? If you misunderstand a single line that might be the entire difference between "solving" the episode or not.
TV has gone from a "casual" experience you can tune in and out of, to a kind of literary-precision experience that demands your undivided attention, for many shows. CC makes sure you understand every word, which just wasn't usually that important previously.
I was hoping for something like the crime app from season 3 of Westworld.
Piracy isn't all about price though. It's about convenience too. And it's not actually free. You're not paying the rights holder but pirating these days requires a lot of storage, a VPN perhaps a pay site or Usenet subscription.
But also all the time to set up a media server etc. Connecting it to the TV (and all the tablets and phones) in a way the wife and kids can also grok. They don't want to search for Westworld_S04E01_H264_1080p_BLAHBLA.mkv in a long list. Oops no that's the one with the audio glitch, you need to find the PROPER instead. But why are the voices so quiet compared to the sound effects? Must be a Dolby Atmos downmixing problem. This stuff can really ruin the mood after a long work day.
When you come home you just want to click on the man with the hat and not have to worry about issues. So you'll need time to review the downloads, categorise content or pay for Plex and a beefy server for the transcoding etc. Fix it when it's down. Keep it all updated. It's not very convenient.
Netflix really beat that out with just click & play for a decent price. It was a good deal even being more expensive than piracy because it saved so much hassle. Most people have a life and more money than time to spare now.
But the insane fragmentation is now screwing this up. Soon it may be more convenient for the masses to pirate again. Who wants to juggle 10 different subscriptions and player apps on all their devices, each with their own UI peculiarities? Having to deal with all the ads? But what show is on which service now?? Oh Prime Video has the movie I want to watch but it's only the Spanish dubbed version??? The industry has to do a very bad job to make piracy interesting again but they are well on their way.
I'd pay €50 a month (which is a lot here in Spain) for a service that carries everything. If I watch all of Westworld this week they can send a big chunk of that HBO's way. If I watch for all mankind the next they can pay Apple. This is what Spotify etc do. Why does it have to be so difficult with video :(
"Hyperpersuasion", nice. Reminded me of Westworld Season 3 and Serac, FYI : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSRZfDL4874
That's not why Malthus will eventually have the last (sardonic) laugh.
All of the things you listed can be made renewable on timescales exceeding the natural lifetime of the sun with only engineering (rather than scientific) breakthroughs, including making the sun last longer and moving the earth to a different orbit to suit the light of the engineered sun.
No, Malthus gets the last laugh because the sub-population that reproduces most, regardless of whether that is caused by genes or memes, quickly dominates the overall population; this means that even despite the currently sub-replacement birth rate, it's reasonable to forecast the population to rise to whatever level is necessary to overwhelm food supply, for any level of food supply.
That can be fixed in principle, but the only solutions I can think of requires tech that makes the two forms of social/mind control in Westworld seasons 3 and 4 look like a child's finger painting in comparison to the filmography of the aforementioned show.
In Westworld season 4 there are scenes were Christina works with an AI editing tool that generates 3D visuals based on prompts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uGLjmrPorg
Westworld (season 1) based their fictional theory of robot consciousness on Bicameral Mind.
I thought it was brilliant, and honestly can't shake the feeling that it might work. It kind of got me fired up about chatbots as a basis for consciousness.
We're typically concerned that chatbots can't be interrogated. They don't know why they said X or Y.
We don't know why either. Why we did or said something. We can reason about the why, finding rational reasons and adopt them as beliefs ex post. Well... Chatbots can do this too. They just need to get better at it... or maybe we just need to get better at engineering them creatively.
What's cool about robotics is that we don't have to prove it theoretically. We need to build it, and then study what we built. Jaynes is a workable model for a dialectical mind. And once we're trying to build a dialectical mind, we'll probably imagine more models to try.
"Technology Science" like much of CS is, weirdly, a good fit for Jaynes-like pseudoscience... using that term sans negative connotations. It does not fit into a scientifically rigorous framework.
That approach is excellent for creative ideas, which we need. OTOH, pseudoscience doesn't have built-in reality checks... making it a poor method for discovering narrow and/or abstract truths.
To a technology scientist, this doesn't necessarily matter. Technologists need good ideas to try. What you build doesn't need to prove or disprove your priors. It just needs to work, or do something interesting. At that point you can study it and bring everything full circle.
And the Westworld TV series adopted it to some degree. I don't know either the theory or remember its use in the TV series well enough to seriously comment but it was brought in at one point.
It's a conversation I've had with colleagues, and I've heard it repeated online (red letter media) recently. I think it's slowly entering public consciousness and some streaming platforms have taken notice and are returning to episodic releases.
Looking back from a personal standpoint, communal watching and discussion of those shared cultural phenomenons really marked my life. The most emblematic recent examples would be Lost and Westworld I think.
But it's funny your comment about TV blockbusters, it shows it's been going on for much longer and we didn't realize it. My mother use to tell me often about her childhood in the 50s, how every week-end they would show the big blockbuster westerns with John Wayne on TV for a whole afternoon, and it's what everyone would watch and discuss afterwards. And it's just now that I make the connection with this phenomenon.
Looking back at my childhood, I can't remember TV being anything but trash. (I think it varies wildly from country to country.) There were no blockbusters on TV, and Cinema played the role of providing that shared cultural experience.
Now Cinema is dead and we're going to streaming. Who knows where it will end, but maybe there will be room for that experience to continue in another form.
Westworld was good for exactly one season. I stopped watching halfway through the first episode of the second because they decided they needed to take a regular woman character and turn her into a “boss”.
> Classic movie music seems to be doing well
Yeah, probably because it's more bound to follow popular tastes than classical music meant to be played only in concert halls. I also like mostly anything by John Williams (Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park etc.), but I'm sure that would be too "pedestrian" for many classic music aficionados (quote from the article "Some of them, such as Korngold and Franz Waxman, were writing film music in Hollywood—a sure way to be dismissed by the anointed"). If you like the Game of Thrones soundtrack, you should also check out the Westworld soundtrack, which is also by Ramin Djawadi - because it's set on Earth, he got to play with reinterpreting pop/rock songs with classical instruments, e.g. "Black Hole Sun" on a (slightly out of tune) player piano or "Seven Nation Army" played with Indian instruments.
> we dehumanize people too just as completely
I had a talk with someone recently about whether we should talk about Russians as Orcs because it is dehumanizing
I'm re-watching Westworld right now because the new season 4 is about to start. The idea that a Google chat bot is sentient is laughable in the context and exploration of what makes up sentience that Westworld explores so masterfully.
One of the best answers to your question, I saw it in a scene of Westworld, in the last episode of the 2nd. season.
https://youtu.be/_LVlbfW-bzY
Dark was infuriating to watch. Visually stunning, great characters and performances, but ultimately an intentionally obfuscated and meandering story that only ends up disappointing you.
It's kind of similar to Westworld season 1 or Lost -- there's this style of storytelling where you drop a bunch of interesting clues to lead you towards possible theories about whats really going on, and then all of those threads are dropped on the floor as if they never mattered. I find it abusive and disrespectful to the viewer.
Westworld manages to make it work. Plenty of science fiction films like Interstellar make it work. Hell, Black Mirror's entire point is social commentary yet it doesn't feel woke.
> questioning the premises our society is based on
There's a difference between doing this in a way that also tells a coherent story and one that just forces themes that don't exist into the story. One of those things is woke and the other one is not.
> How does content consumption work then?
simplified, there are two main branches:
- those who consume everything, kinda like maximizing the investment or "it makes me company"
- those who consume things that need to pass some kind filter
generated content would (maybe) reward the first group, but without some very good hit they will probably go back to downloading stuff, but not the second.
At least not yet and not in the foreseeable future.
There's a difference between computer aided content and computer generated.
Jurassic park wouldn't exist as it is without technology advancements, but the novel was already good.
Another example by Crichton is WestWorld. The original was written and directed by Crichton himself in 1973, the original movie is great, the second chapter is good, the tv-show is visually astonishing, but after 2 seasons, I stopped watching it. The material taken from the first two movies had ended and nothing really interesting have come out after from the writers (IMO).
Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth) is a great book from 1864 and I honestly prefer the movie from 1959 than the its latest 3D incarnation from 2008.
Not because older is better, but because the 1959 version is more centered around the story and it aged better.
Probably because Indiana Jones hadn't come out yet and the director didn't try to imitate it.
Hacker Culture, to me atleast is somewhat broad.
Here are some places where I found good representations:
1. Halt and Catch Fire: 70s/80s tech scene. Full stack hackers building products, companies. Depicts the hackers, code monkeys, visionary types, managers, financers- everyone. Also shows the transition of the business scene from analog to digital.
2. Westworld (Season 1 only) is brilliant. It depicts the ambition, the hubris involved in creating something new and grand.
3. The Travelling Salesman: P vs NP is solved. What are the implications, what are the uses, how will the State react? What is the role of the people imvolved?
4. Primer: Mind bending movie on time machine.
5. and 6. Imitation Game and A Beautiful Mind: I believe most people on HN will like these.
7. Agora is a hidden gem not many know about. It is anout Hypatia.
8. Dangerous Knowledge is a documentary about paradigm changing science. Godel, Turing, Boltzmann are covered.
9. Fractals is also a nice documentary with interviews from Mendelbrot.
10. Codebreaker is a mich more accurate biography of Turing that covers other aspects of his, not limited to his codebreaking and homosexuality.
11. Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz: very nice and left a deep impression in me.
____
I am yet to watch:
1. Hidden Figures
2. Stand and Deliver
3. I'm In
4. TPB: AFK
5. Pirates of Silicon Valley
6. Triumph of the Nerds
____
Harvard Professor Oliver Knill has a list and clips from movies where math appears: https://people.math.harvard.edu/~knill/mathmovies/
____
I came to know a lot of these movies through Kagi search and Reddit search. "Best movies for mathematicians and computer scientists" and similar searches.
My other Four:
o Firefly - no brainer. Brilliant. o Battlestar Galactica - Has some issues mid-late course, but still pretty end-end enthralling. o Dark (I keep re-watching this over and over every few months. I have many notebook pages full of analysis. Seriously good SciFi for the most part.) o Altered Carbon (mostly Season 1 - but Season 2 was okay)
Big Recommendation:
Not really science fiction (even bigger themes explored) but far superior in terms of overall quality of work/screen writing, and has a similar "concept" that a lot of supposed science fiction shows have - "The Leftovers" - Which I put on my list of the 5 most brilliant things on Television (Sopranos/The Wire/Deadwood/Breaking Bad being the other 4).
I'll give a honorable mention to stuff I loved but I can't totally recommends:
o Travelers - I'm a sucker for a good Time Travel Show. o Foundation - Pretty - I watch it, but I totally would never recommend it. o Fringe - Wow - was totally into this. Definitely an acquired taste though. o Raised By Wolves - Interested in where it's going. Could entirely suck eventually I guess. o Black Mirror - Hit and miss, though hits often enough that I keep coming back to it. o WestWorld - I mean, we all watched it. Season 1 was *awesome* if you watched it in realtime and didn't read all the internet commentary when the aha moment hit you. Season 2 was pretty good as well IMHO. Season 3 was just dreck where the screen writing tanked *but* it paid an *awesome* homage to the very last of the Foundation Novels to bring it all home.
The best alternative I can think of is the model explains why 2023 GDP decrease is better in the long run.
Such a model can't exist without an solid understanding of human psychology, and that involves trust. Likely, the machine would need to understand this, and spend the first few months/years proving its worth, such as by making those in control of it rich. To make it work, the humans have to place their trust in the machine. Honestly, it's probably better to invent the machine then feed its commands to a real person that people can place their trust into, not unlike Westworld Season 3.
> Anything JJ Abrams produces is entirely made to be visually effective, rather than philosophically interesting or even internally congruent.
There is one exception. Probably the only one, or at least the only one I know of. JJ Abrams was an executive producer on Person of Interest series, which is to date the best coverage of AI in television[0]. I was shocked when I noticed JJ's name in credits, because the show is very good in the cerebral sense, unlike everything else I've seen his name on[1].
I'm not denying his film-making skills. He's sharp. But his specialty is action and visuals, not deep plots.
--
[0] - It starts pretending to be a run-of-the-mill crime solving drama with a sci-fi twist - the protagonists receive tips of possible violent crimes from an AI. But very quickly it turns into a discussion of AI ethics, state surveillance (the show managed to depict Snowden revelations before they happened!), information security, pros and cons of black-box vs. glass-box algorithms, and AI control/alignment problem. That's on top of good character development and regular (but not overdone) firefights that keep things interesting.
[1] - Most notably Westworld, which, like PoI, was created by Jonathan Nolan, and had a chance of being a spiritual successor - but it became a repetitive, violent action series from 2nd season on, with a plot that serves mostly as an excuse for characters to murder each other.
Getting some real season 2 Westworld secret underground lab robot vibes of this. I think it's all the white.
I know this isn't about Turing test or AI, but the origin of consciousness is life. Existence precedes essence.
All the philosophy about AI developing consciousnesses ignores the fact that we have no objective knowledge or observational data of any level of thinking, let alone consciousness, from any source except the living.
AI would have to live (metabolism, self-repair, reproduction at the least) before it could think. Then the proximate cause of it developing consciousness may well be the breakdown of its Bicameral Mind, should one develop, but life will come first or consciousness never will.
That's why Westworld, season one, had so much potential, basically hinting at Penrose's /Emperor's New Mind/, mostly dismissed by AI folks because they want to believe mechanics not organics will do it, then Westworld went off the rails.
IDk if "serious" is a good bar, but I feel the opposite is true.
First, there are a lot more books than films... and some deal in very interesting ideas. Second, I feel like we're in a new golden age of sci-fi right now. 1950s part 2. Even in the blockbuster film/tv category, there are lot more interesting & creative ideas happening. I thought "her" was very innovative, both in film making and in ideas explored.
Westworld did do a good job of building up fictional theory of conscious machines machines.
Westworld (the TV series) is one of the very few serious treatments of the philosophical implications of AGI I'm aware of in the arts.
Westworld was also more or less my serie fatigue point. I was not a big consumer of TV shows and certainly didn't ever binge but nonetheless it was a tipping point.
I remember seeing indie comedies and horrors. I dont think indy implies serious, altrough there are also sad indie movies.
> . If a viewer wants 'fun' then they're stuck with formulaic superhero blockbusters.
I dont think this is true either. The industry producing formulaic is not because it is only way to have fun. If you look at series that came out lately (Money Heist, Westworld ... ) they are not formulaic and are fun.
Sounds like the RICO app from Westworld Season 3
I thought the Rico app in Westworld season 3 was kind of silly but I guess not now that it has an upcoming release date.
I´m pretty sure that this is the plot of Westworld TV Show.
It has been about 15+ years since I had watched TOS star trek. I recently started watching them again. I recently went back and am watching 1 a week, same with Stargate. I find them very enjoyable again. Some books/movies/shows work better at a particular pace. I found that binge watching them makes them decidedly less enjoyable. Other shows are basically designed to be 10 hour movies. So those are OK to do that with (westworld being an example of that).
Sometimes it is worth taking a break and give it a decent amount of time. Then watch it again. I have a few dozen shows I know I liked when I was younger. I could even give you a 'outline' of one of the shows that I could make up. Yet for the life of me I could not tell you exactly what 1 episode was about without looking it up. I know I liked them. Yet I no longer really remember them. Those are ripe for revisiting. But sometimes it is best to leave them as 'fondly remembered' and my older sensibilities do not match what I had years ago.
But yeah watching the same thing every other day and you will grow bored with it.
My biggest fear with these scenarios is not really the hacking but law-enforcement agencies undermining civil rights by forcing Tesla or other self-driving car-makers to redirect cars against a customer's will. I feel like an episode of Westworld alluded to this scenario at some point. I come from a country where minorities have historically had a bad time at the hands of authorities, and I can see said authorities salivating at this prospect.
WestWorld, particularly S01, is the best take on AI I've ever seen and I consider it must watch TV of this golden era. The concept naturally made for great classic scifi material but the storytelling and execution was absolutely brilliant.
Agreed.
And because consciousness is not physical, I can't fathom where it comes from.
Like...I can grasp the idea of abiogenesis [0], the concept that organic molecules started self-replicating through chemical reactions that over millions of years started forming single-celled life that after a couple billion years turned into complex multi-cellular life and evolution has put us into the form we (and all other life) is today.
But this understanding just makes life look like nothing more than a very specific set of chemical and electrical reactions. To a naive external observer, the human brain is essentially nothing more than a highly complex electrical circuit, and yet, it is conscious.
We know what consciousness is, but it is very hard to define, because as you basically said, it is not physical. It exists, but can't be seen or even measured. You can see evidence of it by interacting with other life that appears conscious, but you can't prove it. If you could assemble a brain atom-by-atom, it could appear to be conscious, but would it? You won't know, and won't be able to know.
Even if we created "perfect" AI and put it into a "perfect" artificial body that was indistinguishable from an actual human (I'm imagining the hosts in the Westworld TV series), most people would say it wasn't conscious, but you couldn't prove it either way.
EDIT: In addition, we think about "conscious" decisions, but are your decisions truly made by consciousness? Think about how drugs will chemically affect the brain and can change behaviors. It makes me believe that free will is an illusion. Your consciousness doesn't make decisions, your physical brain does, and your brain can be altered. You're just a few million altered neurons away from an entirely different personality.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
Imagine a robot trying to argue that it doesn't if they live in Westworld; I mean, the robot bar tender still has to tend bar. Imagine Truman trying to convince himself that it doesn't matter if he's in a TV show or not.
Their arguments, no matter how clever, would be absurd when looking in from the outside.
If there's a high probability that the simulation hypothesis is true, it seems clinically insane to believe that it doesn't matter.
I had to look up the guy that actually designed it, and I realized they have pretty much made all the intro cinematics I adore from TV shows.
Westworld, American Gods, Man in the High Castle and Halt and Catch Fire.
https://www.artofthetitle.com/designer/raoul-marks/
https://www.artofthetitle.com/title/halt-and-catch-fire/
for whatever reason, I thought it was from Altered Carbon..not Westworld. glad i googled to check.
the piece reminded me of altered carbon, season 1.
Agreed. I don't watch movies or TV shows anymore except for the occasional trip to the big screen (last movie was Avengers, next movie I'll go will be Tenet).
Not to mention I don't have a credit card and can't pay for stuff even if I wanted (last tv show I watched was HBO's Westworld will probably skip next season though).
Only thing I pay for is Spotify through a family plan, relative has a credit card of course.
HBO Westworld... Season 1 incredible, magical. Season 2 unraveled but was still interesting. Season 3 was just boring, nothing.
>Why can't you just enjoy a one or two well done seasons?
Not OP, but I share the opinion. For my viewing there are basically two types of shows. The first is relatively mindless entertainment. I enjoy an episode here or there but I'm not invested in the plot. I'm not watching YouTube recaps and "explainers" after the episodes, and I'm not engaged in a community where we discuss the plot and predict where things are going. Barry is a good example of that. Ted Lasso is another good example.
Then there are the shows where I get invested in the plot and story. Shows where I am theorizing with my wife, watching YouTube videos on it, and discussing it online. Shows such as Westworld or Game of Thrones.
There are some shows that straddle the line well, but you usually know ahead of time. Watchmen falls into that category. Single season, compelling drama, had me engaged the whole time, and it was a single season. But I knew it was going to be a single season from the start.
This is the same reason I typically try not to read unfinished trilogies. Patrick Rothfuss and GRRM have ruined me.
It would honestly be really cool to encounter this (or something like it) unexpectedly in some fantasy type movie. One of my favorite things of the new Westworld series was the Player piano openings of more recent hits.
Do we need a modern version of 1984?
WestWorld (season 3) comes to mind but doesn't have the communist structure; but any future dystopia would likely see the party replaced by algorithms leaving just the inner circle and the proles.
Same with -The Thirteenth Floor", one of my favourite movie, make sure you don't read any spoiler about it though.
Nexts on the list:
Moon
Ex Machina - I personally have no issue with nudity but I wish there were less of it in that movie because I know it turned a lot of people off
The Green Mile - not quite changed my view, but reinforced it
Westworld 3rd season (first 2 seasons revisit themes from above movies, they are good but not necessarily new themes)
Breaking Bad - I tend not to like series and this is a really long one, but it really does make you question things.
I do not think we are particularly influenced by American culture, mostly breveté we belive that ours is truly extraordinary and should radiate on the whole world :)
We do watch US movies and series, but probably less the ones that decpit US everyday life and more the well known ones (say, Westworld - but not to start to live like them. Or Avengers).
One of the huge successes of the past was Dallas. Everyone was watching it but there was zero influence on normal life, it was a tale of aliens on another planet.
So no culture overload for us.
They should of optioned Cyberpunk 2077. Season 3 of Westworld was just a copy of Cyberpunk 2077 trailers anyway.
Westworld is one of my favorite shows as well. (Have you seen Person of Interest? Same director, similar themes later on around S3-4)
I think you're right, that westworld doesn't have a lot of superfluous details - but the degree of plot complexity required to make use of all the details it contains has led some critics to call it convoluted.
On the other hand, the Lord of the Rings trilogy - the movies are full to bursting with strange details that never make any difference to the story. Bilbo's birthday party is one immediate example - there's a bare minimum needed to establish some characters, and then on top of that are details just there for the sake of themselves.
In these times with the popularity of Westworld, Altered Carbon and the imminent release of the Cyberpunk 2077 game, we live in a golden era of cyberpunk-themed near future scifi. I hope that if they ever adapt the Gibson sprawl trilogy of books to a TV series, they don't ruin it.
I wonder if this has anything to do with my wife's complaint (and I agree with her on this) that modern productions are beginning to look more and more like computer games.
She's been watching the third season of westworld, and it's kinda scary to me how almost every episode feels more like a game trailer than an actual story...
When someone talks about robots destroying the mankind, I start picturing scenes from movies or tv series (i.e. Terminator, iRobot, Westworld so on) where human like robots try to destroy the mankind.
Robots taking over the world may not be eminent. However, greedy people taking over the world with the help of robots and AI is already being facilitated for quite some time. Governments acquiring technology to hush the oppositions and free speech around the world is a common phenomena around the world. Usage of data along with AI to pinpoint, target and destroy enemies is being used for over a decade.
It is the usage of data and AI by the greedy community we need to be more concerned about, not silly imitation of life that barely perceives the world.
I wasn't able to get very far in that one. Everytime I finished a chapter I felt like I missed out on cooler storylines by making the wrong choices.
More subjectively, I have a hard time enjoying AI uprising games where it's explained that the robots explicitly can't feel emotion and yet they inevitably do anyway.
I much prefer the variant where it's clear that they _appear_ to have emotion, but whether or not it's an elaborate trick isn't clear. Ex Machina and Westworld season 1 come to mind.
And Friends, Simpsons, Seinfeld etc were things whole families watched together (depending on the kids’ ages of course). Families are not watching GoT and Westworld together en masse. TV shows filled with violence and boobs just aren’t going to be ‘everyone’s seen it’ shows like tamer ones, even if it feels to 20-year-olds like ‘everyone’ has seen them.
This is basically the discussion that Westworld (HBO) is having right now. I think it's getting somewhat mixed reviews, but I've found Season 3 to be a fairly prescient plot.
"When we were trying to think about what the future could look like, we scouted and examined a bunch of areas, and that's how we came to Singapore. There's nowhere that looks like Singapore; it's absolutely beautiful on a purely aesthetic level. And it's incredibly different from modernism in other cities, even the lines of it; when you look out of the window (of The Esplanade Theatre), you have these, linear lines, but it's cross cut by these curving rows, which on film always looks so beautiful. There's a different texture to everything and the bounce from the water off of the glass there. The other thing that’s really interesting is the incorporation of nature.
Singapore has done this incredible job of integrating nature into the city. We're staying in the Parkroyal on Pickering and there's greenery everywhere, just crawling up there. There’s a kind of beauty to a skyscraper."
https://sg.style.yahoo.com/interview-westworld-creator-lisa-joy-jonathan-nolan-singapore-filming-location-160114813.html
Nuking Paris and moving the action to Singapore was one of the most blatant "hey asian markets, western culture was yesterday, we want to say hi on behalf of our TV shows" I've seen. HBO has done a bunch of those kinda scenes, Netflix is doing some as well.
> When the producers of HBO’s “Westworld” wanted to portray the American city of the future, they didn’t film in Seattle or Los Angeles or Austin — they went to Singapore. We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?
I've definitely noticed more and more of this in other shows. It's not at all a bad thing, just the opposite: it shows there's big money to be made over there.
The current season of Westworld is very Gibsonian. The main new character (Caleb) is introduced as a vet with PTSD, but as the season unfolds we see he's been augmented, and it's strongly implied that he's living with implanted memories to cover up the horrible stuff he did in the military.
In the most recent episode he got to use a drug called "Genre" that moves you through different states of mental alteration. Whoever wrote this read lots of Gibson.
But the idea that everyone is jacked in to the same network, the hand of corporate control is always present, and shady things are happening all the time, no one thinks of that as unique or novel any more.
In TV show Westworld, early robots are mechanical, but later replaced by biological ones. Does it make torturing early models any less or more bad, considering that they behave the same?
The only reason why I had my HBO subscription was for Game of Thrones. Now that is over, I'm keeping it around for WestWorld season 3, but may axe it completely if it sucks.
I have AppleTV+ (worst name ever, it is so utterly confusing) from my phone and there is nothing I want to watch. Nothing. The shows may be okay, but from my initial viewing, they are nowhere near as good as Game of Thrones. Unless they pick up the quality very soon, it's going to be a complete failure.
The only one worth keeping is Netflix and only because my kids watch some TV shows, and there are a lot of good standup comics on Netflix that I can watch.
But mostly these days I will BT movies or buy them on iTunes, which is by far the most convenient way to watch movies. I have bought about 100 movies on iTunes so far. If they sold their movies for $5 each, I would buy them constantly.
Does watching Netflix, HBO, or Hulu count as watching TV? That's how I usually watch television shows and none has commercials.
If I watch broadcast TV it's through my DVR and I skip commercials.
Pretty much the only live TV I watch is sports and there's a lot of advertising there.
I'd argue that TV isn't trash though. There's an unbelievable amount of stuff being made and it isn't hard to find something great to watch. My to-watch list still has Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mr Robot, Westworld S2, Game of Thrones, and about 20 other series on it.
But of course it's HBO so it'll have plenty of softcore porn embedded within the plot.
Despite the jokes, HBO tend to do a decent job of this stuff. Ignoring the shitshow that was GoT after season 4. The Wire, The Sopranos, Westworld... probably better in their hands than, say, Netflix.
I did not said the message is anti-violence. For that matter, Hollywood is not anti-violence either. These old stories portrait of violence is less glorifying then what Hollywood or superhero does. The tragedy of events is actually shown, unlike in superhero movie.
I said "nuanced" and "better at making you think" which is something completely different. One big reason why it is better at making you think is that it is not having simplistic singular message I am supposed to learn so that I feel like the movie had proper message.
If anything, I would compare it to Westworld or game of thrones, neither of which is Hollywood and neither of which is super simple message of "violence is bad".
I end up doing this organically with HBO. When Westworld/Silicon Valley/Game of Thrones comes out I'll subscribe. But after that, there's usually only 1 new movie on there that I'm interested in so I cancel it.
Considering the actual compression quality of HBO is much worse than Netflix or Amazon and the app sucks to use, it seems like they don't have the resources at HBO to actually do streaming well.
Overall, it doesn't really seem like an efficient way to buy content for either them or me. It's like if a studio made their own DVD player.
> GoT, Breaking Bad, Westworld
finished show with poorly received last couple of seasons, not a hbo show that's streaming on Netflix right now, 2-season old show with a silly 2nd season.
House of Cards was also kind of crap after 4 seasons (and even earlier if we're going to nitpick)
Breaking bad is now seen with rose tainted glasses, but I remember how some folks talked about it when the show was running (esp the fly episode).
Finally, if you're going to praise HBO, not mentioning The Wire is kind of ignorant.
Quote: "One could quibble about creativity, but it’s generally thought in Hollywood that the last great comedy franchise to launch was The Hangover, created in 2009. There have been a few others, like Pitch Perfect and 21 Jump Street, but those both came out around the same time, in 2012. There effectively have been no comedy smash hits in for nearly a decade."</endquote>
Are you kidding me? Last great comedy was The Hangover? Does the author of the article ever heard of Toy Story 4 (now in theaters), Secret life of pets 1 & 2, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Zootopia etc etc? Granted, they are animated movies versus live action like The Hangover but they are movies, big ones, made by Hollywood, with a plethora of A list actors voicing the characters. The fact that they are animated is irrelevant, because the taste of the public always evolves. That's why action flicks of the '80s are no longer enough to entertain us, and they seem a cliche instead. We, the consumers, became more sophisticated, our taste evolved and demanding better quality for our money. Therefore the creativity went where was required, where the public demand it, not to be stuck in the same style of movies. Otherwise John Wayne's style of Western movies would still roll on big screen. Tell me, when was the last time such a Western made it big on box office? I tell you instead that HBO's Westworld is very much a Western style show that I deeply enjoy. That's where the creativity went! To be in the same pace as our modern, more subtle, taste.
Shows that run multiple seasons are among the most popular. I mean shows like Westworld, Game of Thrones etc - and they have way more complex emotions and stories then typical theater movie.
Theater movies have usually simple story.
This is an idea which has been popularized by the new TV series Westworld. It is interesting, however it is not the topic of this paper, which does look instead into sociological perspectives rather than an internal psychological theory which is difficult to be approved.
Jaynes' theory may have merit, but it isn't that relevant to this paper, which is an empirical research paper on social data and theories.
Eh what? Westworld is rated 86% on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.8/10 on IMDB. True Blood is rated 69% and 7.9/10 on the same platforms, respectively.
Which ratings are you looking at?
EDIT: I also checked Metacritic. True Blood is rated 68 on average across seven seasons, meanwhile Westworld is rated 75 on average across two seasons. If you take the Metacritic rating peak of Westworld (Season 1) and the Metacritic rating peak of True Blood (Season 3), True Blood is only four points ahead.
Given the difference between the Metacritic score and the Rotten Tomatoes/IMDB scores, I'd be inclined to chalk it up to different audiences. But even on the preferential platform Westworld basically at parity with True Blood, not "far south" of it.
I fear HBO Now will get bundled with whatever other Time Warner channels into some Netflix-like app. You can still pay for HBO without cable, but now instead of $15/mo, it’s going to cost $30 with twice the content (that you didn’t want in the first place). And they’ll expect it to compete with Netflix. I expect for none of this to affect GoT last season, but probably by the time season 3 of Westworld rolls around.
But at least if you have ATT phone service, you’ll be able to watch it for free.
I agree with you. Watching movies in the theater here in the US (with the exception of some Rocky Horror Picture show type screenings) is distinctly -not- a social experience. Talking and interruptions are forbidden and will get you removed for too many infractions.
I would say serial TV shows can be a more social experience; I get together with friends to watch Westworld and I know the bachelor/bachelorette have big followings.
Not having to deal with separate payment accounts is a huge value add at least for some consumers. I bought HBO to watch Westworld season 2 on Google play. If it wasn't that easy I would have made the effort to find someone's account - still easier than an account and payment workflow.
HBO made at least.7x$40 from me.
If you ask me before I take the two months off, I would plan to write a novel, write, shoot and direct a movie, take the CFA, back test some trading algorithms, and write three apps (one game, one very useful app in a new industry I know nothing about, and some social app) while learning new languages (mandarin and some variant of lisp).
If you ask me after the two months, I most likely caught up on Westworld.
I've seen some interesting uses of this where eg. liking a specific Westworld tweet would have them message you about new episodes, and liking an Apple event ad will have them message you when it's about to start. I wonder whether they'll have a replacement for that sort of use case.
You can't hack your way into fixing what is essentially a non-technical problem. I guess what I'm saying is that loneliness is not a pathogen that can be removed but a symptom of something you don't have (social circle, friends, intimate partners etc.) The most reasonable solution seems to be something like in the movie "Her", or in Westworld where they use humanoid robots as "good-enough" replacements for humans.
The TV series Westworld had a scene where they had Shogun era musicians playing a Wu Tang Clan song on traditional Japanese instruments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__DEAK3AinM
AI in Westworld TV series is based on Bicameralism, which is a philosophical concept rather than mathematical. And from philosophical point of view there's no need to recreate human mind neuron-by-neuron. If a copy can't be told from the original then the implementation details do not matter.
HBO Now is so weird. I subscribed for a couple of months to watch Game of Thrones and Westworld. I figured I might as well check out the rest of the service too. HBO has many decades of original content right? There should be tons of stuff to watch on there, but I could find barely anything. It was just a light crust of the most current shows, whatever movies they were currently licensing, and a few crumbs from the back catalog.
I ended up dropping the subscription because I'd watched everything interesting on the service in no time flat. I could have been watching Tales from the Crypt for months, but it wasn't available at all. Where is the Rey Bradbury theater? Shows I'd heard about growing up but only got to see briefly in a hotel room on a trip. For a service nearly twice as expensive as Netflix they made seemingly no effort to keep me engaged.
More importantly, Hotstar is ₹999 per year right now and you get movies, TV shows including GoT and Westworld, live sports including IPL and F1.
Well Season 1 of Westworld had an interesting premise. Season 2 is just standard robot wars.
Season 2 of Westworld had fewer viewers than Ballers. Ballers. You're right; it's a huge-budget show, and one HBO clearly hopes will be a tentpole. But it's no Game of Thrones.
I don't buy the logic here, and I'm not sure David Sims does either; this strikes me as one of those headlines that was written by an editor, independently of the article.
For as much as anybody here likes HBO, the diagnosis Stankey (and, I think, Sims) has of it seems apt. HBO has a sterling reputation. But so what? Even today, they're no longer distinctively good; in fact, there are basic cable channels (AMC and FX) that have given HBO a run for its money.
Does anyone really believe that HBO is going to outcompete Netflix on original programming over the long run? Netflix introduces new programs like Google introduces new chat programs. It's not even an event for them. They just randomly drop them in the middle of the week, as if they don't have time even to promote them. Have you ever started an episode of Jessica Jones and had to wait 2 minutes for them to promo the next season of Mindhunter?
And that's just Netflix. Amazon will eventually figure TV out. Disney controls Hulu now. Apple is making a move into online video.
Meanwhile, after Game of Thrones ends, what's HBO got for tentpole series? Westworld? Besides the fact that it won't be airing again for 2-3 years, its renewal was not even a certainty.
I think Stankey is right. If HBO is going to be a factor long-term, a thing people pay substantial amounts of money to retain access to, it is going to have to look more like Netflix and less like a thing you pay your cable company extra for. HBO could afford lulls of a year or two taking flyers on just 1-2 new prestige series (Carnivale; Newsroom; Vinyl). But premium cable is over, everything is going to be disintermediated, and HBO will need to justify demanding $15/mo directly from people. I'm not sure it's worth that today.
Netflix takes the shotgun approach, put out as much programming as possible and something will stick. Amazon has yet to provide anything but a bad UI/UX on top of tv or music I can find from a much better competitor.
Silicon Valley, Westworld, Vice, and Game of Thrones are worth it plus a steady stream of new movies. Not to mention their older shows. HBO’s quality is much higher than Netflix and Amazon doesn’t even compare.
There's tons of great TV shows nowadays. Mentioning Grey's anatomy and Glee does a disservice to TV.
Besides the obvious Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad there's Stranger things, Black Mirror, Westworld, just to name a few. Hell, all of the above are much much better than 90% of the crappy Marvel/superhero/blockbuster movie Hollywood keeps spewing nowadays.
My approach is that I can only watch an episode of a show if I spend the first 30 minutes of it on my stationary bike. (I am currently following Westworld Season 2 and The Expanse Season 3.) Tying my motivation to do cardio to my motivation to see what happens next has worked well for me. Getting motivated to lift 2x a week is another issue...
Westworld (HBO) isn't a Western per se but it is a Western setting (exclusively so in S1). Godless. Longmire. It's definitely not the staple that it was at one time in the US but it's certainly not extinct.
Which is what I meant by my upthread comment. I don't expect or wish superhero movies to go extinct. I'm sure they won't as they have antecedents that are literally ancient. (Greek, at least, mythology.) I just wish there wan't such a glut of them and that they didn't tend to incorporate so many of the annoying features of typical modern action movies.
SyncOnSet Technologies | Full-stack Web Developer | $80k - $120k + equity + benefits | Boston, MA | On-site or Remote
Our customers: TV shows such as Game Of Thrones, Stranger Things, and Westworld, feature films such as Wonder Woman and Justice League, and pretty much every major studio including Netflix, HBO, Fox and Warner Bros. What do we do? SyncOnSet Technologies has revolutionized TV and Film production management. No, seriously, we have a Primetime Engineering Emmy Award to prove it. Our product, SyncOnSet, is an industry leading platform for creative professionals to manage script breakdowns, fitting notes, continuity photos, inventory, and much more. If you are interested in the entertainment industry and building great products, please get in touch!
Prefer developers for our Boston office, but would be open to candidates in other locations with a history of working with a remote team.
Tech stack: Node.js / Angular / React / TypeScript / Postgres / MySQL / PHP
Website: https://www.synconset.com/ More about this job and others: https://angel.co/wymsee/jobs
Contact: rob@synconset.com
Movie and video game soundtracks.
Can't recommend Ramin Djawadi enough(he wrote soundtracks for Game of Thrones and Westworld). Here's a great example of his music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS-gbqbVd8c&t=0s&list=PLTT-Xb7kSZWXO48LcIeXBIP-hetLW50YG&index=80
Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard are also great:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxabLA7UQ9k&list=PLyVPkvhD7G7rcW4o7MLMXus6Kq1cbh2Op&index=1
And I love halo soundtracks, here's my collection:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTT-Xb7kSZWWp4MXXUtnye9kvlqS3JTP3
> Season two, which returned more than a year later with a significant marketing push and a solid lead-in, was down 24 percent among total viewers and averaged 457,000 total viewers. That compares more to similar returns for Syfy's inexpensive co-productions like Dark Matter and Killjoys, than to the cabler's original scripted series like The Magicians and Happy.
I'm a huge fan of both The Expanse and The Magicians, but if the above quote is true I can see where they're coming from. The Magicians is a far more accessible show than The Expanse, and if I have to decide where to stick marketing dollars I'm going to go with the show with the larger audience.
Also, although I love The Expanse, it is not nearly as compelling as BSG or Firefly. When BSG came out 14 years ago it was really a singular experience in terms of cable TV. I would say something like Westworld follows more in the footsteps of BSG than The Expanse. And Firefly tapped into the same energy as Guardians of the Galaxy but 15 years too early.
Overall, very sad but not surprised. At least the TV show got me reading the books...
I don't know why each episode is supposed to be so expensive. I assume they overspend on the wrong types of VFX.
As for Westworld: though the cast is large and costly, the actual shots themselves can be done relatively cheaply since they don't need VFX for most of them.
I can’t believe The Expanse is more expensive per episode than Westworld for example. It all feels so cheaply produced. The books are awesome btw.
Animal Kingdom did not made me feel like crime life is good and murder there felt badly. Similar with American Psycho. Westworld made mass murder by the end feel fine, a bit sad at maximum, while Game of Thrones made them feel disgusting. People don't root for sociopaths or even good guys in Game of Thrones as much. So I think a lot of admiration for sociopaths comes from how they are shown on screen, what kind of music is played etc, and not just from what they technically do.
Similarly, I like horror movies a lot. But, it is not nearly the same as video of real person suffering (or realistic portrayal). I don't like those at all. Horrors are made to feel you fake bad and it is similar with most popular movies about sociopaths.
SyncOnSet Technologies | Full-stack Web Developer | $80k - $120k + equity + benefits | Boston, MA | On-site Our customers: TV shows such as Game Of Thrones, Stranger Things, and Westworld, feature films such as Wonder Woman and Justice League, and pretty much every major studio including Netflix, HBO, Fox and Warner Bros. What do we do? SyncOnSet Technologies has revolutionized TV and Film production management. No, seriously, we have a Primetime Engineering Emmy Award to prove it. Our product, SyncOnSet, is an industry leading platform for creative professionals to manage script breakdowns, fitting notes, continuity photos, inventory, and much more. If you are interested in the entertainment industry and building great products, please get in touch!
Tech stack: Node.js / Angular / React / TypeScript / Postgres / MySQL / PHP
Website: https://www.synconset.com/ More about this job and others: https://angel.co/wymsee/jobs
Contact: rob@synconset.com
> But write the next chapter in "Dystopian AI" cinema.
I think Person of Interest is the most interesting exploration of Dystopian AI to hit popular culture in a while. I thought it was fascinating how they turned the gimmick of a standard episodic procedural crime solving TV show into the all encompassing theme of a serialized TV epic.
Person of Interest starts pretty slow, but his ability to progress the show without losing his audience is the reason why Jonathen Nolen was trusted to produce as ambitious a TV show as Westworld for his next project.
I'm not convinced. You don't consume music the way you consume TV shows and movies, it's often a more "passive" activity where you start a playlist in the background while you do other things. You can do that with movie/TV shows of course but a movie will last you ~two hours while a TV show can literally last you days or weeks at a time without input if you really like having The Office in the background while you do other things. Assuming that you can afford buying subscriptions to various services it's not massively annoying to have to use HBO Go to watch Westworld and Netflix to watch Arrested Development. It's not as good as having a unified service but it does the job.
If like me you like composing playlists instead of playing one full album at a time then not having the vast majority of your music available on a single service is a huge deal breaker. When I hear a song out there and I want to add it to my playlist I expect that it will be available on Spotify and the vast majority of the time I'm right.
If I need to go hunt for songs on various services and I can't easily make a single unified playlist with all of it I think it'll be back to piracy for me, it won't be less convenient and it'll be much cheaper.
SyncOnSet Technologies | Full-stack Web Developer | $80k - $120k + equity + benefits | Boston, MA | On-site
Our customers: TV shows such as Game Of Thrones, Stranger Things, and Westworld, feature films such as Wonder Woman and Justice League, and pretty much every major studio including Netflix, HBO, Fox and Warner Bros. What do we do? SyncOnSet Technologies has revolutionized TV and Film production management. No, seriously, we have a Primetime Engineering Emmy Award to prove it. Our product, SyncOnSet, is an industry leading platform for creative professionals to manage script breakdowns, fitting notes, continuity photos, inventory, and much more. If you are interested in the entertainment industry and building great products, please get in touch!
Tech stack: Node.js / Angular / React / TypeScript / Postgres / MySQL / PHP
Website: https://www.synconset.com/ More about this job and others: https://angel.co/wymsee/jobs
Contact: rob@synconset.com
What happens when you have a 'being', made of silicon and algorithms, but takes the form of a human? Or, for a better case, what happens when our own brains are 'part algorithm'? In that case I think this sort of case wouldn't be so cut and dry. I'm thinking of some recent films and TV shows that really explored these issues; Humans, Ex Machina, Westworld, and Altered Carbon.
Do you have any links or citations for a number even close to that? It’s live viewership numbers are lower than current HBO shows like Westworld that don’t overall get 30M viewers per episode.
Or did you have a different meaning for 30M than per episode? Usually that’s what people mean for tv so I am assuming that.
Spoiler ahead
In season 1 of the modern adaption of Westworld it's the robot actors that don't know they are not real. The customers know it's not real.
If anything else happens in the books or the movies or other series I don't want to know.
This is why I never got the hype around Westworld. It's a fun concept, but the entire plot of season 1 could have been accomplished in two, maybe three episodes.
Sounds like there could be multiple more really interesting things to watch.
It's great to have entertainment choices, but does anyone else get the feeling that there are literally tens of thousands of interesting things to read, watch, look at, or play with, and only time to check out a handful of them?
It makes it hard for me to pick because I know I will be ignoring most of this huge pile of amazing stuff.
For example, I played The Witcher 3 for a month or two and really enjoyed it. But eventually after seeing 20 or 30 other things pop up that seemed amazing, I decided to check out a few of them. And then there are more and more. But I actually barely started progressing in The Witcher.
I have several books that I got really cheap used and I intended to read like Ringworld (which I don't remember if I actually read many years ago or not) and The Engines of God. Plus six more good ones. I got halfway through one of them before realizing I needed to catch up on some Westworld episodes or something.
The thing that makes it tough is I do a ton of filtering with metacritic or whatever to ignore everything except the best stuff, then I try to dismiss more things as boring or uninteresting but anytime I actually check them out, they are amazing like the reviews said. But then that means I am going to miss out on thousands of amazing things.
I guess I just feel like it's a shame that I have to ignore most of it, until such time as I no longer need to work or spend time on my own creations and can dedicate full time to consumption, and am able to upload my brain and clone it 500 times to start to trim the pile.
We are more and more nostalgic about everything. But I don't see how people can think TV shows were better in the 70s, 80s or even 90s. Since 2000 we live in the golden age of TV shows. We got The Wire, the Sopranos, Mad Men, the Shield, (Game of thrones?, Westworld?) and a ton of original concepts. I tend to think that nowadays there is more originality and risk taking in TV shows than in the movie industry.
This summer, I watch Twin Peaks The Return, some episodes are the weirdest things I have seen on a mainstream TV channel. I am amazed it was allowed to air at prime time.
Are there any efforts to make movie-type window styles for real use? The Tron:Legacy style would be a fun one to have, as well as the one used in the computers in Westworld (similar light-blue-on-black)[1] and Interstellar [2]. I'm sure it's a more difficult process than I'm imagining, but it would be really cool to be able to use the window and interface themes of the computers in your favorite show or movie, especially since some have such great designs.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikup60uEg0c [2] - https://youtu.be/bmz9lMP6aQU?t=2m4s, visible for a brief second just after 2m4s
> One thing intrigues me though - albeit likely a function of my lack of knowledge on the matter - do these requirements implicitly rule out shooting on film for Netflix?
In terms of resolution, no. Standard 35mm can produce a good quality 4K transfer (depending on the speed of the film you're using), and if you shoot on VistaVision (which is where you use 35mm film but rotate it 90 degrees) can go even higher.
Of course, the cost to do so is massive, and it's getting larger ever year. The only TV show I know this year that was shot on 35mm was Westworld.
Joe Public can't afford to shoot on 35mm for his/her Netflix original series even if they wanted to. Netflix would almost certainly only let an extremely experienced A-list director shoot on film, both because they'd be able to negotiate it but also because on film you can only usually afford a 3x overage (that is, you shoot three times what you end up using), whereas with digital that can go as high as 10x. It takes a really disciplined director and DP to manage that.
Yeah; that's what I meant about "dumbing down" the movie. I agree that Ghost in the Shell in all of its iterations is heavy on exposition -- which makes it a difficult show for audiences to get into.
I also agree about your point about Westworld -- I think Ghost in the Shell could be pulled off as a live-action TV series because the exposition could be spread out across a whole season. Because it often doesn't have a guaranteed global market at the time of production, anime in general tends to be a balance between ambition and budget -- the compromise often being "recap" or "expositional" episodes focused on one or two characters (fewer voice actors to worry about) and using recycled animation. I get why they do it, but it's frustrating.
Well, you also can't have those lengthy expositions from the 95 anime. I think in a good film you would show the outlines to philosophical angles about consciousness without filling them in with so much prose. Of course GITS '17 went a bit too far in the other direction of keeping the dialog too simple, eg. the bad guy blurting out his clearly-bad motivations. I think Westworld achieved a good balance of throwing in monologues while keeping scenes lively...
We're in an interesting cultural moment for narratives like this, between Her, Ex Machina, GITS, Alien: Covenant, the upcoming Blade Runner 2049, and the great TV show Westworld.
This is my favorite essay on these themes, tying together threads spanning from ancient myths to contemporary movies: "The Robots Are Winning!" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/06/04/robots-are-winning/
One interesting thing I've understood when discussing GITS the anime vs the new movie is that in the anime, Motoko embraces her cybernetic body, so the question is: What does it mean to be human? But in the new movie, Major is the first cybernetic body, so the question is more: Who am I? This an interesting essay by Hideo Kojima about the differences: http://www.glixel.com/news/hideo-kojima-on-the-philosophy-behind-ghost-in-the-shell-w475805
By the way, people into GITS might like this post we made about shots in the movie recreated from the anime: https://medium.com/@gitsost/a-love-letter-to-ghost-in-the-shell-how-shots-from-the-2017-movie-allude-to-the-anime-972a7dfb74e8
Westworld (the TV series) is making it popular again.
> I can't stand that who can sit still for that long?
You could... space things out yourself, you know? :)
> Production quality is suffering too which may indicate shows are being made too fast.
Debatable. There's always been bad TV series. And production quality actually seems to be going up. Game of Thrones, Westworld, House of Cards are some of the most expensive and high quality TV shows ever produced, being not that off from Holywood blockbusters in terms of actors, special effects, sets, etc.
"is self-modification compatible with volition?" That's a plot point of WestWorld. A more interesting TV series than I expected.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. I'm on at least my third reading and imagine I'll read it again.
Also re-listened to Getting Things Done by David Allen. This could also be any number of times.
Sort-of related, currently re-watching Westworld. I burned through ten episodes in two sittings first time around and wanted to properly appreciate it this time at a more leisurely pace.
What a coincidence that this gets written right as I decide to ditch television and begin going out to see films again. I already watch the least television out of anyone in my peer group(when I do watch anything, it's usually educational & self-development content on Youtube), yet I feel that I've come to an understanding about what this "television renaissance" really is.
* from here on out, I'm using the word "television" to mean both TV & streaming.
While there we have seen some excellent writing for television in recent years, and while there are more than 400 scripted shows being produced for both television and streaming, I'd argue that most of it is trash. Now hear me out, because I know that word gets used in a relative sense, but I'm trying to be objective here. I call it trash because as well-produced as these shows are(in terms of acting, sets, effects), few people that I know, including myself, actually watch these shows all the way through to their last season. From the conversations I've had with people, it sounds like a common thing to binge through a couple of seasons of a given show, get bored of it, and then move on to another one of the hundreds of available shows. Is this really such a good thing? Is this better than the state of the film industry at its height? I've started asking myself these questions a lot lately, as my experience tells me the average person isn't getting a whole lot of lasting satisfaction out of a given show yet they are spending an inordinate amount of time "bingeing".
The film industry screwed itself in the behind for more reasons than are in the linked story. Big studios are well-known for destroying the creative process and watering down what might otherwise become a classic. Evidence of this can be found in interviews by writers & producers who, years after they've cut their ties with studios, feel safe to talk about what "could have been" if the executives didn't return scripts with a bunch of notes and lines crossed out. So not only did we end up seeing a lot of inferior products at the cinema, but we were paying out the ass for it; somehow we were paying over $20 to watch mediocre films while sitting in dirty theaters, and people gradually caught on to the fact that it sucks. On top of that, we they began subjecting us to loud video advertisements before the trailers would run.
But then why would I go back to film, you might ask? Well, I'm fortunate to live in LA, and we do have a lot of "arthouse" cinemas that have a far superior experience, if you are willing to look for them. There are still lots of independent and foreign films being made that are at least decent and break the mold of the average Hollywood blockbuster. More importantly, I think it's healthier to see a film every once in a while, and actually be around other human beings, than be at home eating diet ice cream while Netflix autoplays. Films also tend to have a story that has to be complete in at least 1.5 hours; contrast that with the J.J. Abrams style of television show that's common these days, where we're lead by a carrot on a stick for several episodes(possibly entire seasons!) by some idea that seems neat but actually has very little payoff, only to be then redirected to a more enigmatic carrot on a stick(e.g. Lost's "hatch" or the "maze" in Westworld). With film, the worst that can happen is you lost a couple hours out of your life, and that doesn't happen that often for me. Meanwhile, I've known people who watch entire seasons of mediocre shows just because those shows are new, and that's a lot of hours that could definitely be spent doing something better. What a coincidence that those same people have energy levels far below what they should have for their age!
EDIT: I forgot to include the real point I want to make: people will realize that they are overvaluing the time they are spending in front of the tube, and there will come a point where the film industry makes a comeback.
I find HBO shows equal or better in quality than the best Netflix shows. Westworld was fantastic. My wife and I just started watching The Young Pope. In a few months GoT and SV will be back on. HBO is learning from Netflix and coming out with some fantastic shows. I also like catching recent movies on HBO before they show up on Netflix, Amazon Prime etc.
Of course, Netflix is well worth the subscription and if you don't watch a lot of TV, it has enough content to keep you entertained for a while. But I've noticed that I discuss HBO shows more with my friends/family than Netflix ones.
I agree, and it is by no means exclusive to the US. It's lucky for the US that it's still in a position to easily lure people from almost every country.
And this won't chance too soon, most TV shows and films, e.g. Big Bang Theory, Mr. Robot, do nothing to normalise the perception of these kinds of jobs. Workers are always portrayed as weird/quirky/dysfunctional. The closest portrayal to normality has been the workers in Westworld. But those jobs weren't exactly aspirational either...
I tried watching season 1 of Humans but was jaded by first watching Akta Manniskor (Real Humans), the Swedish series it is based upon.
It seems that sometimes a lower production budget yields a better story. Forced to rely instead on the viewer's imagination and subject interest. Especially if it's done with aplomb and intelligence.
I found the dialogue in Humans to be too "explanatory." Haven't seen a full episode of Westworld yet, but imagine the same is true. Big budgets tend to to that.
Which is a reasonable handwave until you start asking about the physical damage that the bullets do to [EDIT] hosts and ignore the mayhem involving explosives, fires, etc.
It doesn't especially bother me though. We know that TV and movies generally have a convention that trauma that would put someone in the ICU in the real world is brushed off as a flesh wound. And I'll accept technobabble about the bullets. I'm also happy to accept that maybe Westworld takes place in a culture where theme park risks on par with base jumping are considered fine and proper.
Westworld (2016) is an amazing show. In my opinion it is more about how real it feels, than the thematic itself. I'm convinced that same approach would work for other genres, not just sci-fi. It is a kind of hyper-realist cinema, where the plot and acting is so superb that feels credible and breathtaking.
I loved westworld. I think it shows imagination and elevates TV. But it starts at a point where the AI is already real. They robots are able to parse reality in all 5 senses in real time and respond. The are physically sophisticated, are supposed to be bio-chemical and match humans in dexterity and motion.
Season 1 focuses on the next step which is consciousness and choice, and the 2 critical theories to explain the emergence of these in the show is bicameralism and memory. It doesn't dwell too much on the how and focuses more on the consequences of it, which is a fascinating journey.
You sound like someone who could benefit from 300μg of LSD to think his life through and perhaps make major changes, alternatively psylocybin. No offense, but it seems like you're mindlessly executing a social script meant for someone completely different. Like a Westworld host's loop (a tv series).
Regarding parties, if you want to make yourself social, try MDMA with selegiline. Selegiline is to prevent MDMA from being neurotoxic [0].
>BTW, during that seduction community time I spent endless hours at bars and clubs, surrounded by people having fun and pretending to have fun myself. I never had any fun there. It was more of a war zone which I tolerated in pursuit of a goal.
You weren't alone. Most, if not all, men go to clubs in hope of getting laid. Those that have fun find the whole process fun; a game. They are the most extroverted ones so it may seem like it's the normal way to spend free time, but in reality they're a small minority. Nothing weird with not liking it, or not getting along with those that like it.
>I did that because I was tired of being a virgin
Literally, or do you mean combined with being single? If literally, why all that work on seduction instead of paying a prostitute?
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17881526
Blade Runner's production design is beautiful and almost prefectly timeless in its depiction of a future. The only thing that dates the film for me is the cathode ray tubes. They are even in the flying cars I think.
Directors and designers could start using flat blue devices so that interfaces can be re-imagined, in 2-D, or 3-D, and composited in future re-masterings. I like the non-desript tri-fold devices in Westworld. Kudos to the 2001 team for getting imagining tablet interfaces although that did not sway the jury Samsung vs Apple iPad case[1][2].
[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/23/samsung_cites_science_fiction_as_prior_art_in_us_ipad_patent_case.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electronics_Co.
Ray Dalio is a fascinating person. He purchased a one-word .com to share his personal and management principles, and now he is attempting to train a learning system to automate and preserve his decision-making.
There's a movie script somewhere in here. Exaggerate the narcissism, advance the science 50-100 years and we've got an eccentric billionaire that causes an artificial intelligence uprising. Like something between Transcendence and Westworld.
A few other thoughts from reading the article:
• Dalio seems like a classic case of someone pursuing immortality in whatever way he can. His coming out of retirement, his efforts to leave a legacy of "radical transparency" and to make his company an "altar of openness", etc. He is also 67 years old. He may feel as though he is "running out of time", and I've seen an uptick in media mentions surrounding him and Bridgewater. There's quite a few religious themes here.
• Bridgewater might be an excellent case study in radical changes that result in success, but it also might not. In particular, there are two challenges. First is the culture of Wall St, which lends itself more to a "show me the results" manifesto and can probably tolerate a culture of open criticism more than most other companies. The other is that Bridgewater is a single datapoint. We know almost nothing about the inner workings of e.g. RenTech, but they are just as impressive (albeit with lower AUM) and have a more "academic" culture. Does the culture matter that much, or is the success a result of a confluence of other factors? Someone who appears to pride himself on his contrarian decision making like Dalio might see his culture as the defining differentiator responsible for his success.
• I find it much more likely that Bridgewater's culture of open criticism (and elements of quantified self?) is like Zappos Holacracy and Valve's "no managers" manifestos, rather than a new set of principles to be brought down from on high. Each of these companies prides itself, and to some extent claims is the reason for its success, on a culture that was deliberately implemented instead of organically grown. After you see enough of these I feel you start to become "culture agnostic", and from my point of view I don't feel any of them has a causal relationship with profitability or productivity.
• A nitpick here - it seems hypocritical to reduce a culture of "radical transparency." If you decide to change the status quo from radical transparency for 100% of the staff to radical transparency for 10% of the staff, then what is so radical about it? Equally, what does it mean to only dole out radical transparency to those "responsible enough" to receive it? That sounds like...transparency.
>TV just isn't a priority because the vast majority of it is pure trash.
>TV had it's heyday
I can tell you don't watch much TV. It's never been better. We're in a golden age of TV, it's just not on ESPN. There have recently been a lot of extremely high quality, hour long dramas, which basically amount to a movie every week. Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, The Wire, arguably Westworld, to name a few.
I feel like "emotional but just doesn't make me feel the sentiment" scenes are an intentional specialty of westworld. There are enough "false" endings to emotional scenes (e.g., the beachfront scene in the final episode of s1) that the viewer is trained to question the authenticity of any emotion expressed by the hosts. You could say that that's really the crux of the whole series, and still an open question. The best modern successor to Philip Dick in that regard.
To each their own of course. Perhaps it's the underlying plot that really bothers me with Mr. Robot -- it feels very 90s to me, even if the surface details are much better. Today, we live in a world where "lone genius hacker" types are becoming thoroughly commoditized. It's all about careers, money, thesis papers. Weaponised exploits are now bought and sold. To people with capital it might as well be magic, why should they care? If you're a kid who identifies with a character like Elliot on some level, you may not realize that's what you're getting into. Maybe this is toched upon in a way I didn't get or see in Mr. Robot?
Then Westworld is basically science fiction, with a good bit of philosophy (which I didn't expect when I started watching it). I liked the way it shifted perspective between the guests, hosts, and operators throughout each episode so much, it left me questioning reality a bit for a few minutes after each episode.
>I care more about a good story... Which is why I stopped watching Mr. Robot at the beginning of season 2. I just didn't care about the characters or story any more...Personally, if you're looking for a good story, involving technology and morality, I can't recommend West World enough.
Interesting. The same critique you have of Mr. Robot, I have of Westworld: plot lines that are irrelevant, huge loopholes, and characters that don't develop and that I don't care for.
Yeah its not exactly an apt comparison I suppose anyway.
Westworld is quite brutal to the characters and you're right, mostly plot driven. And I did find much to like in the first season of Mr. Robot, but then I got bored with the story arc near the end and into the beginning of season 2.
This is somewhat tangential (although related to the "good guys" hacker trope), but one detail I loved from the begining of Mr. Robot was the reference to Enron with the Evil Corp logo. I will definitely give the show credit for its self awareness of it's 90s roots...
Re Westworld: The theory of consciousness explored in the show is explored in more detail in Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, as alluded to both in the show and in the title of the final episode. I've just picked it up, and it's a pretty interesting read so far. I've also noticed that a lot of little details from the book used in the show, such as referring to memories as "reveries" at points, and talking of minds as "hosts" of consciousness. I may need to re-watch the show after finishing the book!
I found a pdf version of the book here if you are interested. http://selfdefinition.org/psychology/Julian-Jaynes-Origin-of-Consciousness-Breakdown-of-Bicameral-Mind.pdf
Three books I enjoyed this year:
this census taker, China Mieville
To Say Nothing Of The Dog, Connie Willis
The Possibility of an Island, Houellebecq
If you enjoy science-fiction, it is quite possible that you wouldn't enjoy any of the books above or even classify them as science-fiction (I would though) -- so definitely look them up or try the kindle sample to see if they appeal to you.
Also, I see Ann Leckie's Ancillary trilogy mentioned elsewhere, I second that recommendation.
[Also, honourable mention to the TV show Westworld -- if it were a book I would have included.]
Cripes. I shouldn't have binge-watched "House of Cards" and "Westworld" last night.
> The only difference is that it's all video-on-demand now
And ad free, or pretty much (HBO sometimes has a minute of ads before episodes, at least those are sometimes worth watching. That's how I found about westworld, for example).
I'd buy cable if it was ad free (and cheaper).
Right now I have netflix, hulu plus, amazon prime (+ motortrend for 5 bucks), hbo now, and nhl gamecenter. It's not cheap, and it's not the best experience going through apps. It's still better than ads.
I think Westworld naming the next episode "The Well-Tempered Clavier" could, somehow, lead to a resurgence in interest in GEB -- lots of people on /r/westworld seem to be interested, for sure! (For one, I've heard that the show's creators have admitted that they are creatively indebted to the book in some ways.)
But a lot of people use it at near full capacity on Sunday evenings when a new episode of Westworld is out.
I think Westworld is perfect example of a powerful new show with a large canvas that could struggle. The writing is delicate and nuanced, the cast a tour de force and the acting sublime.
However the plot development of the AI by Nolan is a bit complex and layered which in many way makes it intriguing but also I think leaves casual viewers struggling to engage. A core fan base is already engaged but the numbers show that inspite of being clearly imho some of the best television in a long time it might not be renewed because its too expensive to develop.
I personally think the weekly format is not friendly to this kind of complex show, viewers are not able to hold the strings together in their head or have no desire to keep track. At least 2 episodes a week or more can help alleviate this but that changes the economics and dynamics of how these shows are written and shot and in the interim there is room for HNs favourite word 'disruption'.
Even more confusing on the TV show timing now thanks to Internet streaming. Westworld on HBO may technically broadcast at 10pm Eastern, and on HBO west it is broadcast at 10pm Pacific, but then it's also available on HBO Go and HBO Now to stream at 10pm Eastern.
> You see the Node.js philosophy is to take the worst fucking language ever designed and put it on the server.
Had to laugh at that!
In the recent Westworld episode (S01E05), the lab tech was trying to program the bird's AI and his file was called "New Script.wws", where .wws is apparently "west world script".
Look here: http://i.imgur.com/oG9xM8o.png
Immediately, the thought crossed my mind, "Must be fucking JavaScript! No wonder the AI will soon start killing the humans" :-)
In my faux outrage, I went into theoretical scenarios of how exactly JS caused SkyNet. To be fair, once my flash of righteousness passed, I took a closer look and .wws looks nothing like JS. Also, there seems to be C or C++ on the LHS.
I still bet WWS is some kind of duck-typed shite that relies on the cult of TDD to keep the robots' behaviour safe.
checkNoKillMode(str). "Look, all my tests pass. We have 100% coverage".
Yeah, except when str == '', in which case it evals to false. Of course, there's no test case for that.
Could have very plausibly been so, but actually I was just watching through a playlist of “Murderous AI”-trope films. (Live in Italy, Westworld not released here yet.)
I thought the first three episodes were brilliant. The rest are also good - San Junipero is quite enjoyable - but the last episode was somewhat underwhelming for me.
S3 is probably not as good as the rest of the series, but it's much better than anything else currently on TV, except for Westworld of course.
I've really enjoyed Westworld so far - GoT lost me after the red wedding (too much... television stress) and 3 episodes of this restored my faith in sunday night episode treats. So much reddit theories to read :)
> If you can explain the mechanism behind the manifestation then you can understand why it isn't real.
I watched, with my family, the Algorithms documentary available on Netfix. While not perfect (but very, very good), it certainly did a great job of explaining in simple terms some algorithms and how they relate to the world.
One of the most interesting parts, in my opinion, was the admittance during the section where they were discussing the XBox Kinect. It was all done through some machine learning algorithms, and impressively, they confessed to not being completely certain how the code actually worked. You could argue that this means that they cant explain the mechanism behind the manifestation.
Now, of course, this is a massively simplified version against the near-future Westworld narrative. However, it does call into question whether we would understand the mechanism of something so advanced. Also, applied to humans, if we end up understanding the mechanisms behind the brain, then does that make us less real?
They point out in episode three I think that one of the 'Hosts' are experiencing physical discomfort while going through diagnosis. If such a thing were coded, and it was made possible to respond to it (I would argue that the best possibility for making this possible would be a learning algo, similar to the Kinect analogy), then how would that be different from the very physical and chemical responses that a human has to experiencing suffering?
It's hard for me to make a decision in either direction. It is a complicated and nuanced problem. It reminds me of the short story "They're Made Out of Meat" [1], and could just be the result of human-centric (or in this case, biologically-centric) thinking.
1: http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
A bit Off-topic: Definitively watch Westworld if you have some time to spare. Only three episodes aired so far and every single one of them was amazing and worth to watch IMHO.
> A machine breezes right through large mazes that could take hours for a human to solve by hand. When would such a test be useful? I'll leave that to the imagination of the reader.
You could imagine androids using that as a sort of reverse-CAPTCHA to distinguish people from machines and preventing the latter from entering their secret gathering place.
Which brings me to the last episode of Westworld... Boy, I have a theory about the Maze for you...
I've seen the first "season" of black mirror it was OK is just don't like that type of Scifi I like my Scifi more bigger than life, and while i don't mind some "futuristic earth" shows Black Mirror has the same issue I have with most UK shows and that they produce too little episodes to even fill an afternoon, but Black Mirror just took it to a whole new level with having like what 2-3 episodes?
The new season on Netflix will hopefully be at least 10 episode long so I might actually take another spin at it, waiting 10 years for another 3 episodes of Luther or Sherlock is bad enough I'm not going through this again.
With US TV shows I usually wait until at least the mid season or the 9 episode pickup because lately US TV shows especially from the bigger networks have less job security than the offspring of JRR Martin novels and the Walking Dead characters.
So far we had quite a "decent" year, 12 Monkeys has been renewed, Childhoods End and Westworld are coming, the CW actually managed to make comic book shows (never was a huge comic fan, infact i never had a chance to read a single book i think) cool, we are bloody getting The Man in the High Castle show on Amazon and Marvel's Netflix production is in full gear.