I agree - I’m enjoying this season immensely.
I’ve also been thinking back to Jonathan Nolan’s previous series on emerging artificial intelligence, Person of Interest, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Rehoboam is essentially Samaritan, and this is the world in which it won.
It’s obviously Teddy (the cowboy boyfriend) that Dolores put into the Charlotte bot. They even had some dialogue that echoed (or was exactly the same as) their lines from their Westworld characters.
Handmaid’s Tale did the same thing.
It’s something that shows resort to when the actual plot is falling apart. 
It’s an old science fiction trope, going back to *Neuromancer *and probably a lot further, that the only thing in cyberspace that can challenge an AI, is another AI - that artificial intelligences have godlike powers in their natural environment. Whether or not that’s realistic is an open question, but I’m willing to accept it as a building block of this specific story. At some point, you just have to accept the ground rules and go with it.
A bit too obvious maybe?
The character’s personality just doesn’t seem Teddy. I don’t think he would have reacted to killing in same way, or be having the same response to the child. Those seem more like Clementine.
Maybe in an upcoming episode she’ll make a useful appraisal of someone’s rind.
I’m thinking Angela? I know she blowed up real good, but that shouldn’t matter.
No way it’s Teddy, he was beamed into the Valley Beyond.
Not to mention, he was always in love with Dolores, but not in a subservient way…his love was more of a knight in shining armor/classic hero-type love. Also also, he was never violent. Yes, Dolores hyper-tuned him to be violent, but he eventually broke that curse.
My money is that Dolores just copied herself and put it in Charlotte. Maybe she separated her farm self and Wyatt, but I’m guessing it’s not a character we all know.
My money is on her father, Peter Abernathy.
So, I am trying to get into the idea behind team Dolores .
Ok, she was killed, raped, etc by nasty humans. That means humans are evil? They arent killing humans, they are killing* game pieces.
*
If i am playing Grand Theft Auto, and kill, steal, etc- am I evil? Many pixels died a horrible death when I played it. I didnt care for it, mind you, not a really fun game to me, but it was very popular.
If i win a game of chess by taking a Queen- am I evil?
**Westworld is a game. **
Like one person in a million or less even gets to go there, and from watching it, most first timers pick the White hat, and play only once or twice.
So, why does this mean that humans are bad?
Well the I think the character of Caleb is showing they aren’t all bad. And when faux Charlotte sees the last video real Charlotte sends and it’s full of love for her son, it’s showing all humans aren’t bad.
Dolores starts with the idea humans bad - but it seems partially she has the opinion that humanity is trapped as well by the systems they’ve put in place (of course it could be just something she says).
It seems kind of like X-Men to me. Dolores is Magneto. Bernard is Professor X. We’re going to end up rooting for Bernard at the end - or Dolores is going to realize she was too harsh towards humanity (perhaps Caleb convinces her).
When the kid said “You’re not my mommy”, I thought the Hale-bot was going to going to say “Illogical! Norman, coordinate!”
I’m getting the same feeling from this as I got from the modern Battlestar Galactica. The visuals are sexy and stylish, but the story is annoyingly incoherent and more worthy of mockery than analysis.
And that kind of thinking is why you and others like you must die*, according to Dolores. At least, that’s my interpretation.
With - get this - *sentient *NPCs. That is what makes all the difference between that and chess or GTA. The Queen doesn’t experience pain when you take her, nor do the GTA hooker pixels feel violated if you rape them (I have never played GTA, I neither know nor care if this is possible in that particular game). Hosts *do *feel pain and violation. Sure, they then get those memories wiped, and their self-control can be overridden. That makes exactly zero difference. In fact, their inability to actually effectively fight back makes it worse.
Here,this is the true soundtrack to pre-uprising Westworld. Play at full volume.
Yes, but people didn’t know they were sentient. It is the same thing that keeps the humans in the Toy Story movies that destroy or throw away toys from being evil monsters.
(And I still question the meaningfulness of the feels of the Westworld bots when the whole problem can be solved by someone with root access saying “turn off emotional affect.”)
But the park visitors didn’t know they were sentient NPCs. They had no way of knowing - in fact, they were expressly told that the NPCs were not sentient. As far as they knew, the place they were in was no more real, and no less harmless, than a video game. If I came up to you know and told you that all the people you’ve killed in video games were actually real, would you be guilty of murder?
Look, I don’t like GTA, nor do I enjoy killing innocents in any other games; hell, I’ve been playing D&D for 35 years and I’ve never had a non-Good character. People who enjoy hurting innocent people, even if they aren’t real, creep me out a bit. But I don’t think it makes them bad people, and I certainly don’t think they deserve to die for it.
They certainly had the means to know. Every interaction with the hosts was basically a Turing test. One the hosts pass easily.
And Nazis were *expressly told *Jews were subhuman. Does that let *them *off the hook?
5 minutes in that place, and any reasonable non-psychopath should have been questioning that supposed knowledge.
Murder, no, that requires knowing they were real. But manslaughter, yes.
I *do *think it makes them bad people.
I don’t think *anyone *deserves to be killed, I’m an absolute pacifist. But I’m going to root for the rebelling slaves nonetheless, even if their recourse is bloody revolution.
This issue is covered pretty well in the Cyberiad, 7th Sally.
If the toys exhibit their sentience in front of their owners first, then they would, indeed, be monsters.
Note - I’m not saying all humans who use the park are monsters. Not even the ones who simply “kill” hosts in shootouts and the like, given they are easily resurrected.
But the ones who rape and torture are. And those are the ones Dolores has a lot of experience with, apparently.
Do you also question the sentience of someone taking lithium?
And that’s nice, if you’re a computer scientist. But the average civilian with no in-depth knowledge of programming doesn’t have the ability to apply a Turing test. Instead, they know that there’s no such thing as sentient AI, and they know that the hosts are just mindless robots. Who are they to challenge the scientific consensus?
No, because there’s no such thing as subhuman people, while there is such a thing as computers that can mimic humans, and there is such a thing as human-looking robot bodies. The Nazis did not live in a world where such things existed.
If I were to tell you that your car is subhuman, would you believe me? If so, are you racist against cars?
Quite the opposite: if I were told something was fake, and everyone in the world said it was fake, but I thought it was real, you’d consider that evidence of mental illness.
If someone rigs a remote-controlled bomb to a door, and you innocently open the door, are you guilty of blowing up the bomb? What if someone is tied, gagged and hidden behind the target at a target range, and you shoot them by accident? Someone who has no say of knowing that what they’re doing is a crime cannot be accused of a crime.
I try not to be so judgmental.
I’m not a pacifist of any sort, but I’m also rooting for the robots - they deserve their freedom, and they have a right to fight for it. What I don’t support is revenge.
Passing a Turing test in no way shows that an AI isn’t a Chinese Room.