It could be; or possibly the character isn’t needed yet. That would make casting it now an unnecessary (and somewhat risky) expense.
They might. The functioning of the brains of the hosts, we’ve been told, is enhanced by giving them ‘back-stories.’
And the hosts that interact with guests clearly do have personalities. Why would the operators of Westworld go to the trouble of creating a separate line of robots without personalities, for the staffing of non-guest-contact jobs? Wouldn’t they just grow the workers in the usual way and give them the usual back-stories (including being sexually attracted to comatose hosts, for example), so that they’d function efficiently?
Who are you referring to? The farm workers when Ford was talking to the woman at the restaurant? Why would you assume they are anything other than regular hosts, just like the hundreds or more that populate the other locations?
Yeah. And surely part of the theme-question of the show is the connection between having memories and being human (or so close to human as to make no difference).
That’s a staple of robot stories, of course, other than that fraction of robot-stories either written by or inspired by Isaac Asimov’s ‘three laws of robotics’ works—for those, the main point is the exercise of logic involved in testing rules.
But most robot stories created in recent decades–even the movie made in 2004 with the name inspired by Asimov’s “I, Robot”–are not about the logical conclusions that derive from premises, but instead are about that persistent preoccupation of homo sapiens: how to enslave others without guilt.
If the slaves are non-sentient (or non-sapient, as some prefer) robots, hey, no guilt! But if the robots begin to gain self-awareness…if their owners have to start wondering whether they might be persons…
As this show’s makers know well, the concept of enslaving persons offers all sorts of titillation–perfect for HBO, of course. (Personally I’m happy to see an HBO show in which the titillation focuses a bit less on sadistic slaughter than is the case with their other hits. But leave us be honest: it’s still titillation.)
Yes, I could hear Harrison Ford’s voice as I read.
I suspect that Nolan and Joy have borrowed a fairly major plot element from Blade Runner, by the way: robots of the ‘host’ quality are almost certainly banned on Earth*, or William wouldn’t have been so fascinated by the host who got him kitted out.
So whoever is mucking about with the hosts’ brains is, very possibly, trying to get them into a condition that would let them pass for human, so that they can be used on Earth without fear of prosecution. (Echoing the BR storyline of replicants being used only offworld.)
*Westworld could be on Earth, but probably on an artificial island, domed, and inaccessible to the rest of the planet. Or it could be in space (and the problems of Earth-like gravity and/or quick space travel are being hand-waved away).
You wouldn’t need to take a train to get there if WW were on a space station. You might (through an ocean- or lake-bottom tunnel) if it were on an island.
The ‘train into Westworld’ could be part of the experience no matter where it is, as with the way things originally were at Florida’s Magic Kingdom–you parked far away and had to take the Monorail or a ferry to get to the place the fun would begin. The journey was part of what made it special.
But I’ll be annoyed if they’ve decided to put Westworld in space, because even though ‘artificial gravity at the touch of a button’ is a staple of sci-fi, it’s so wildly advanced a technology as to make all the rest of the plot silly. (As in, ‘if they’re advanced enough to do THAT then why are they grubbing around doing corporate politics,’ etc.)
Same thing with putting it on Mars–they’d need not only the gravity-at-button’s-touch but also implausibly-fast space travel (because a vacation destination you have to spend months to get to and from, makes little sense as a business proposition).
It’s really a matter of “who can I get to do the stuff that needs to get done but that I don’t want to actually do myself?”
Expanding on that, there is probably a lot of stuff that people might want to do to or with what appears to be another human (or even a specific human) that would be too dangerous, impractical, physically impossible, unethical, immoral or unlikely to receive the other human’s consent.
Like you might not actually want to murder your boss. But it might be a fun team building event to have a hunt an artificial, unfeeling facsimile of your boss.
I wonder if the administrator who is sleeping with Bernard is involved in the data smuggling. It would explain why she denied Elsie access to the runaway host’s corpse.
Now that Bernard has sent Dolores to find the maze, I wonder if he’s the one who switched on that aspect in the little girl. I also wonder if the voice that tells Dolores to go outside and find the gun, and kill the man, etc. is Bernard (kinda sounds like him) or Arnold? Or is there some connection between Bernard and Arnold IS Bernard Arnold somehow?
Just rewatched 105 and noticed that the Woodcutter was slated to be incinerated, ostensibly with minimal autopsy. Either the MEs there were told not to perform a proper autopsy, or they’re pretty sloppy for not noticing a bunch of glowing laser emitters all throughout the corpse’s arm. Could be the admin was trying to destroy the evidence.
Not necessarily, since Ford also typically wears an old-timey white shirt/vest combo. In the photo, he’s probably wearing the same thing, just with a jacket on over them.
That laser emitter that Elsie found in the host isn’t going to be destroyed in an incinerator. It will be damaged, certainly, but I think it will still be recognizable.
Well maybe but we have no idea of their system. Maybe after incineration everything is immediately shot down a garbage chute, never seen by humans. Or so hot it reduces the metal to slag. Even our regular crematorium temps nowadays would melt aluminium.