Imagine Jurassic Park , but instead of genetically modified dinosaurs, you have artificially intelligent robots who have been developed to sate the desires of wealthy tourists. What could possibly go wrong? A prototype for the one with the dinosaurs, this is the plot of Michael Crichton’s 1973 film Westworld . By now you may have heard that HBO will debut a modern update of the original movie in October . Executive produced by J.J. Abrams and written/produced by Jonathan and Lisa Joy Nolan (writer of The Dark Knight, Memento and Pushing Daisies ), and with a cast including Anthony Hopkins, James Marsden and Evan Rachel Wood, it is already creating quite a stir online. This isn’t the first time that Westworld has been tackled as a series. Three years after it debuted in cinemas, an incredibly camp movie called Futureworld took the theme park to Mars, and the humanoids cloned humans only to dispose of them and steal their lives back on Earth. And J.J. Abrams has been so keen to develop Westworld as a series that he’s had the project on the backburner for the best part of 20 years . What is interesting is how we predict AI . Regardless of whether our predictions are academic or purely speculative, the conclusions drawn are remarkably similar. AI is in a constant state of being imagined 15-20 years into the future, which allows for a certain creativity for the showrunners if both scientists and Hollywood are speculating with the same degree of accuracy. The 1973 Westworld movie saw a theme park divided into three zones that catered to decadence, violence, and indulgence without ramifications in the manufactured world of Delos. There was Roman World, for bacchanalian debauchery; Medieval World, for jousting, mead, and those silly cone hats with chiffon […]
