Interestingly the title of Episode 10, the season finale, is The Bicameral Mind.
Good catch. Evidence that Ford is not what he seems is piling up. Seems pretty likely to me that Ford and Arnold are or were the same person. The Bicameral Mind title very strongly suggests it of someone, and Ford is the best candidate. Ford and Arnold were once one consciousness, then the proverbial “corpus callosum” was cut and now there are two independent minds that don’t know what the other is thinking. Alien hand syndrome, except one hand is a body and the other is a ghost whispering to the hosts.
That, or The Bicameral Mind refers to (spoilers from 105 preview which covers the second half of the season):
A hinted mutiny/rebellion/fracturing of Westworld staff. I recall some shots of armed security prowling the complex and some remarks by (Ford?) that suggested that a violent power struggle was eminent or in progress.
But I think Bernard is a human. We see him discussing his son with his wife in 103. Unless they built a host wife to maintain his backstory, that one seems like a hard sell. Even if that was true, and he’s been there “forever”, wouldn’t other employees notice that he hasn’t aged at all over ten or more years? That’s assuming that the hosts don’t age normally. Dolores is said to be the oldest host still operating in the park (not counting the unauthorized mechs Ford has). They mention servicing her, but there’s no detail as to whether service simply means fixing injuries or if it includes undoing aging as well. Either way, I think it’s more likely that Ford is a host (or a human with a fractured psyche) than it is that Bernard is a host.
ETA: I’m wondering if there’s additional significance to the rule to never set Bulk Apperception above 14. Perhaps whatever happened with Arnold had something to do with setting it too high, causing either a violent host rebellion or for the affected host mind to fracture.
I don’t think the “don’t make the snuff/sex slaves too smart” rule needs a lot of backstory.
Yeah, and the robot sparrow, too!
No, it doesn’t, but it’s still open to speculation. Why did they pick 14? Did they make some calculations and determine a theoretical safe limit, then add some margin? Or was there an incident? We already know there was at least one incident with Arnold, so it’s possible that the Bulk Apperception stat figured into it. Or not. It’s just a theory of mine.
If setting the stat too high is dangerous, then why would they even let the stat range go that high? Unless they set everything on a 20 point scale initially, then found out that certain stat levels were too dangerous. I would hope that a code review would catch a problem like “BA field theoretically allows hosts to achieve self awareness if set to max value”. But then, they should have gone back into the code and set the actual max to 14 once they instated the “don’t set BA above 14” rule. So who knows? I guess these sort of sloppiness issues don’t go away just because it’s a futuristic shop creating actual biological life in a post-scarcity world.
I wonder if there are minimums for each stat, or total stat points. I can’t imagine that they want an “all 1s” host stumbling around the saloon, drool on his lips and dookie in his inside-out pants, freaking out the guests.
They save those for IncestWorld.
I thought that was Game of Thrones.
I have seen nothing to suggest this company has sane software engineering practices. Not to mention that, theoretically, all the hosts are controlled by one body of people. They probably wouldn’t care about hard coding a limit if they believe a small handful of responsible staff are the only ones able to touch those parameters.
Folly? Yes, but not an unbelievable one by any means.
Did you ever see the old SNL skit about the “House Committee On Dials & Gauges” hearings?
It could be that these “hosts” are being, or at least eventually intended to be, used for stuff other than theme park robots which may require higher intelligence.
Or it could be that their brains are made so robust that the ability to be super smart is an unavoidable consequence. So I guess they could make a hard block on the setting but the ability would still be there waiting below the surface. As an anology, think of a car engine. There is no need to build a car for the North American market that can go over 70 mph - that’s about the highest speed limit in the land. But if you want good acceleration you end up with an engine that’s capable of high speeds. So you could put in some kind of speed limiting mechanism but if you can disable that, the car can speed.
In the most recent episode as Lutz was giving Maeve a tour of the operations, I was marveling at how complex it all was. It looked like there must be hundreds of people who work there. We haven’t been told how many guests they host at once, but I doubt it’s more than a hundred. So can they make this pay as a business given the amount of infrastructure involved?
And how far did Ford and Arnold get when they were trying to do this just as a partnership?
You are correct, so much for my memory.
It costs $40k a day per guest, so if they can keep it open year round (or just average 100 guests over the course of a year), that’s $1.5B. Not a tremendous amount of cash given the necessary tech and real estate, but certainly enough to employ hundreds of people and pay for a reasonably impressive complex. Cheaper yet if some of the employees are also hosts.
Also, it may be that it was supposed to handle more guests than they’ve shown but the economics didn’t quite work out. For all we know, there was a $100B initial investment that got written off somewhere along the line. The park just needs to pay for upkeep, not necessary pay for all of the capital costs.
I’m pretty sure this was stated fairly explicitly at one point – Theresa said something about 1400 guests and 2000 hosts.
That seems like a bad ratio. It would make it super easy for any one room/street to be majority guests. Do you remember the context or episode it was in?
I couldn’t remember exactly, so I looked it up. Episode 1: Westworld (2016) s01e01 Episode Script | SS
So that’s 2,000 hosts.
I think Theresa, Bernard, and whats-his-face Mr. Excitable storyline guy are there.
EDIT to add: I don’t think any one room or whatever being mostly hosts is really out of line. Think of how some of the guests act…like fratboys, or nervous nellies, or too drunk, or talking loudly with no accent or about website design or whatever the hell jobs there still are in the future…it would kill the immersion somewhat. Rooms full of hosts acting all Wild-Westy would help preserve the intended atmosphere, if nothing else.
Ha, now I see you said mostly guests. Yes, that could be bad. I guess the hosts (and the control-room people) try really hard to draw guests out on quests to disperse them to different places.
This is an argument about terminology. I would guess from your posts that you assume “host” equals “robot (or android)”, whereas I’m questioning whether the terms are intended, in the world of the show, to be synonymous.
I was using “non ‘hosts’” to indicate ‘androids who are doing work other than direct-guest-contact work.’ The show is somewhat ambiguous in the use of its terminology referring to androids: in the episodes we’ve seen so far, when a term is used it’s been with reference to an android that IS in direct contact with guests.
But we don’t know that in the world of Westworld the word “host” is being used as a synonym for “android”. It’s possible that in the world of Westworld, “host” is used to refer to only to those androids that directly interact with guests. We can’t tell yet because no scene so far has included dialog in which someone refers to, say, the workers in the fields. We in the audience saw that those workers were clearly not humans because they responded instantly to Ford’s command (however it was conveyed)–but neither Ford nor Theresa used any particular term for them.
And there’s good reason for the writers to avoid nailing that down, if the plot of the show rests (as I believe) on the questions of Who Is Human (and Who Isn’t)?, and also Are Plans Being Advanced to Infiltrate The Outside World With Non-Humans?
One more possibility: that Arnold was Ford’s dad.
I suppose the possibility seems unlikely to us due to Anthony Hopkins being 78, and one doesn’t always think in terms of a 78-year-old’s father. But of course the numbers could work out if we’re talking “thirty years ago,” with Ford being mid-40s and his father Arnold being mid-60s.
The only argument against that (coming to mind now, anyway) is that when William and Logan were discussing the park they used ‘two guys started it’ or something similar, instead of ‘a guy and his son started it.’
(Thank you for the photos–I agree that they do appear to be of the same actor in the same costume.)
They didn’t necessarily have to build a host wife. Remember, we saw him interact with a video. CGI could take care of that (and the AI-capability we know they possess could create an interactive program that would let Bernard participate in a “conversation.”)
As for Bernard aging–we’ve seen that the hosts are now flesh-and-blood. Seems as though they would age. (And that Dolores would be youth-ified on a regular basis to keep her appealing to the guests.) Alternatively, if they don’t age, Bernard could be taken into the shop (without his knowledge) and be made a bit older-looking each time.
I was thinking the same thing. It would explain the resemblance.
Heh, heh. I saw what you did there. 