Sooner or later he’ll run into a border raider.
It’ll be Griefer v. Reaver.
I thought it was another good episode, even if not as much happened. I did love No Surprises on the player piano. I would have thought there would be an orientation, or at least more of an explanation of the risks that the guests are taking on. It seems like it would be trivially easy for a guest to stab another, or maybe even shoot another, either on accident or on purpose.
Or it’s possible that the robots that people run into in real life aren’t as lifelike because they don’t need to be. I’m sure it’s much more expensive to have lifelike robots, and if a robot is giving you your airplane ticket or cleaning your kitchen it doesn’t need to be lifelike, or even anthropomorphic.
I would think most people would hesitate to treat a host like garbage because they aren’t real, because people do tend to anthropomorphize things that aren’t even human-like, this Ikea commercial being a good example. But plenty of people do treat other real people as garbage here in the real world. And I’m sure that’s not the first time the jerk co-worker has yelled at someone in a restaurant to go away and stop bothering his table, even if he usually doesn’t stab them.
Also, it seems like a big waste of resources for him to be shot down like that after all the work has been done. I would have thought Anthony Hopkins would have to sign off on the storyboards or character sketches or something, not wait until everything is done.
Obviously someone does know he’s trying to hack the system, since the daughter stopped crying and being scared and calmly told him “the maze is not for you” and something that was like a clue. But I have no idea who it was that got the little girl to say that, if it was Hopkins or who else.
Also, just because the guests haven’t seen lifelike robots running around in real life, doesn’t mean that they haven’t run into other uses of the technology. Westworld could be a profitable R&D type facility. The Corporation could have the 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, prediction of human behaviors, surveillance, and other technology used in the park used in very different ways in the real world that the the guests wouldn’t have necessarily encountered or noticed.
If supermodel fuckbots CAN operate outside of the park, I’d be quite surprised if they’re not doing so.
Like in the original movie, the guns won’t shoot other humans. We saw this when the James Marsden character tried to shoot the Ed Harris character. We also saw it in Maeve’s flashback when she tried to shoot Ed Harris. The way these guns work hasn’t really been explained though.
As for the knives, the showrunners gave this explanation but it doesn’t sound very foolproof to me.
We’ve seen hosts try to shoot guests, but hadn’t seen one guest try to shoot another, but the jerk co-worker was very confident that shooting someone would be the way to prove if someone was a host or not so I guess that is basically foolproof.
The knife explanation is interesting, and would seem to indicate that they have very advanced technology if they can anticipate guests behavior and jump in just in time. Pretty similar to Person of Interest really.
…interesting interviews with the showrunners here: (Open spoilers to episode two, and some general open spoilers about the mechanics of the park, so don’t read if you want to remain completely unspoiled.)
Just another interview with the show-runners, making the point that they are gamers:
I think the same way. 
On how the guns works:
So I imagine they are like pellet guns. Shoot it at a human, it stings like hell. Shoot it at a host, it breaks the “skin”, triggers an explosive bolt of some sort and out comes the blood and gore.
There is a “Westworld Experience” website which in their infinite wisdom is not available outside of the US: so please let me know what is there.
Apparently the cost per person is $40,000 per day, and people have died in the park. From another article about the website:
How does one accidentally self-cannibalize? Hit the buffet while blindfolded?
Yes, it would seem unlikely that they have robots this advanced for 30 years and society would not be overrun with even simpler robots doing every mundane task.
To play devils advocate, we actually don’t know what the rest of society is like. Maybe they do have lots of robots. You just can’t go around fucking and shooting them with impunity.
Also, these robots seem very high maintenance. That may make them cost prohibitive for most functions.
I just watched the 2nd episode and I recall they set this up earlier in the episode with a conversation between “storyline creator” executive and “tough female” executive. Storyline guy was telling her about it and she questioned him that the storyline had not been submitted for prior approval, etc.
I was wondering about that. Not everyone wants to dress up like a cowboy and play Old West games. So are there brothels with hosts/prostitutes in every major city?
I really enjoyed the second episode, especially starting off with the first time guest experience - that was pretty well done. I also did find it amusing when the storyline designer decided that he’d just do his storyline without running it by Ford and it’d be fine… and then it wasn’t fine. Of course the storyline designer doesn’t know what “corporate’s” true agenda is regarding the park. Though there is the question as to whether corporate’s agenda and Ford’s agenda is truly one and the same.
I can suspend disbelief (especially for now) that yes, even after 30 years these robots are still pretty unique. But who knows, maybe the versions 30 years ago looked more “Rockafire Explosion” than “Supermodel Cylon” and they’ve been incrementally advancing all this time…the later versions still protected intellectual property and untested for general-world uses. I think it’s clear, too, that Ford and the other lead researcher (?) have either some personal motive or research interest that is driving their development of these things, and possibly the park just provides the excuse and the funding to pursue those goals, whatever they are.
They may not really care to make a zillion dollars furnishing brothels and whatnot, or more likely, they are well aware they are playing with dangerous toys. Confining them to the park where they can monitor everything, control the environment, control the available weapons, constantly do psych evals on these hosts, and immediately recall and store away malfunctioning units may be the only “safe” way to use them.
I can imagine, perhaps, that the robot hosts are each tied to a supercomputer downstairs that controls its interactions, communications and memory. So it wouldn’t be possible for them to exist outside the park.
If that’s the case and they’re not at all independent, that how did that one host “wake up” during surgery and throw a genuine-seeming scare into the two human techs?
I don’t know. I’m just trying to rationalize the idea that the robots are only available in this one park. Because, as I said, I think that most people are going to find an Old West adventure unappealing, or would at least prefer a different theme. (Roman orgy, perhaps?)
I’ve encountered this dilemma just from playing video games. I remember when the Knights of the Old Republic Star Wars game came out and I played it through a few times. You have to make choices as you go that tend to be either “light side” or “dark side” and it was best to go all in on being either light or dark. After playing “light side” a few times, I decided to try playing dark. Which means you have to bully the other characters, make completely selfish decisions, ignore pleas for help, and kill indiscriminately. Even though I knew it just a game, I found it difficult to make the dark decisions each time. I forced myself to do it because I had decided to be dark, but I actually felt really bad about killing and stealing from these animated characters. So, yeah, I would have a really hard time being mean to a lifelike “host.”
I’m guessing no. They seem like they are super expensive and require constant attention.
Yes, but I could see even how an expensive host could be amortized through $300 hourly fees to entertain customers 24 hours a day.