With its thought-provoking storylines, intelligently written characters, and balletic action sequences, Westworld has proven to be one of the most engaging series to watch right now. Based on the film of the same name and written and directed by Michael Crichton (best-selling author of Jurassic Park), the HBO series explores the possibilities of visitors living out their every fantasy in a theme park filled with robots who help simulate the Old West. The series offers compelling quandaries about ethics, artificial intelligence, and the consequences of our increasingly-automated world.
David Eagleman is the renowned neuroscientist who has advised the show since its first season, helping the creators develop a near-future (30 years from now, to be exact) that is a possible extension of our own. But can we really expect to see robots that we might confuse with humans? Or that are composed of organic material as well as wires and software? Below you'll find five things about the series that are scientifically accurate, and five that make no sense.
SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE: CORPORATE OWNED
The original Westworld film in 1973 was created at a time when people in Detroit were terrified that computers and automation were going to take over the automobile factors. In 2019, Westworld is still fueling that panic as more and more industries become automated.
With mega-corporations like Google and Amazon competing for resources and making their jobs automated, there will be a vocational scarcity as time goes on. Companies like the fictitious Delos Incorporated of Westworld mirrors their real-life counterparts that have a monopoly on AI and automation, as we've seen with self-driving cars and drones.
MAKES NO SENSE: A PROGRAMMED DRIVE
There's a scene early on in the series where the theme park creator (Anthony Hopkins) asks one of the "hosts" what its drives are and it replies with typically human things, like "family." By giving an artificially intelligent being a programmed drive, it raises questions about what happens when if it malfunctions.
Most of this creates a "robots take over the world" doomsday scenario like in Terminator, but it could just as likely be similar to I, Robot or Blade Runner, where the AI simply defend themselves against humans tampering with their drives. The robots may choose to maintain the drive at all costs, and override fail-safes to protect human life.
SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE: MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN
One of the main problems visitors run into with robotic "hosts" is that they're so life-like that the visitors can't always tell they're synthetic beings. While we're incredibly far from the ability to create such experiences with the AI we have now in the flesh, we will be fooled by virtual interactions.
There are chatbots that already exist for everything from retail customer service to interacting with lonely people who just want someone to talk to. They're programmed with thousands of algorithms and subroutines designed to make the chatting experience as natural as speaking with a human.
MAKES NO SENSE: A THEME PARK POPULATED BY ROBOTS
The original Westworld film was written and directed by best-selling author Michael Crichton, master of blending genres, in 1973. It was followed by a sequel, Futureworld, and its own short-lived television series. Like all sci-fi, it was only limited by the parameters of its author's imagination in the era he was conceiving it.
In the same way that Blade Runner failed to predict self-driving cars and the way computers would dominate our world, Westworld imagined the people of the future would want to go to a physical place and interact with physical things, rather than enter a virtual reality environment. Virtual reality will be much more realistic in 50 years than humanoid robots.
SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE: THE BIOLOGICAL COMPONENT
The hosts in Westworld are put into cold storage because they have biological components. In order to be easily confused for humans, they need to be able to feel warm to the touch, sweat when it's hot, and bleed when they're injured. Like the Replicants of Blade Runner, when they're cut open, it's not just wires and gears you see, but organs.
These days, genetic researchers have been able to grow certain pieces of organs in laboratories. We're not far off from entire hearts, lungs, and livers being grown from cells and put into ailing bodies of people who need organ transplants. It's conceivable a practice like this would be used in the future to create a being combined with AI technology, but not for a very long time.
MAKES NO SENSE: KILLER ROBOTS
The concept of "killer robot" scenarios come from the idea that AI or robots will one day become smarter than humans. They will prioritize their own programmed goals over human life, become conscious and sentient, and decide that humans are no longer "efficient" or necessary.
This isn't possible 30 years in the future (when Westworld is set) or really ever because AI cannot "learn" the way humans do. AI can categorize, but it can't take past experiences and apply it to new situations. It doesn't have the human ability to adapt so organically by design.
SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE: LIFE-LIKE ROBOTS
While we may be a long way off from the sophisticated AI featured in the series, we currently have humanoid robots like Sophia, designed by Hanson Robotics to socialize with humans. Sophia was programmed with over 50 facial expressions to make her seem more life-like.
Interactions with her in interviews and during demonstrations are still "rigid," and there's a bit of the uncanny valley happening because there are 43 muscles in the human face that provide micro-expressions she simply can't have. But she a wonderful tool for learning about advancements in technology and AI development.
MAKES NO SENSE: AN AI WITH DOUBTS AND FEARS
Right now, AI can do several miraculous things. It can beat a chess master. It can do hundreds of thousands of computations in a second. It can resemble a humanoid, at least visually. But it cannot adapt and learn from past mistakes, and it cannot have a "gut instinct" or "a feeling" about something the way a human can.
Building an AI with doubts and fears makes it incredibly inefficient by design. So to make it more human, it's a less efficacious machine. Why would we want AI that wrestles with moral dilemma or that gets angry enough to kill someone, or that is "torn" between two decisions?
SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE: HAPTIC VESTS
In the second season, a full-blown robot revolution is underway, necessitating Delos Incorporated to send in military personnel as part of an extraction team. The military team wears haptic vests, designed to transmit specific patterns of vibrations to assist in identifying the direction and location of robot hosts.
This "geolocation" system of tracking is based on real-world tech being used by the military, which in the series allows for the team to tap into the hosts' mesh network. The network that allows them to communicate with each other also exposes them.
MAKES NO SENSE: REPLICATING THE HUMAN BRAIN
In order to design the sort of AI that appear on Westworld, engineers and scientists would need to reverse-design the human brain. As it is, neuroscientists don't understand the human brain in its entirety, but for a small percentage because it's so complex.
A simulation of the human mind requires more computational capacity than is possibly on the entire human planet right now — a zetabyte to be exact — and has to be done on the microscopic level, which certainly isn't going to happen for us by the time Westworld takes place.