NEW ADVENTURES IN SCIENCE FICTION

In the original film Westworld (1973), written and directed by an up-and-coming novelist named Michael Crichton, the Delos corporation operates a kind of Disney World for depraved adults, a series of amusement parks where they can interact with uncannily lifelike robots in various environments.

The parks include Medievalworld and Romanworld, but the bulk of the movie’s action takes place in Westworld, where visitors are invited to shoot at android attractions like the Gunslinger (Yul Brynner) without fear of retaliation. All that changes when a technical glitch spreads through the parks like a virus, and suddenly the hosts are attacking the guests, not the other way around.

Of the many differences between Crichton’s Westworld and the HBO version, which started its second season last Sunday, the most telling is the hands. For all their technical brilliance, the engineers in Crichton’s film could never get the hands right: If visitors needed to tell who is and isn’t a robot, they could look at the conspicuous silicon rings around the joints and know they weren’t about to shoot (or otherwise violate) a human being.

That little detail might spoil the fantasy of a truly authentic Old West experience, but it’s also a clear line of demarcation between human and machine. The Gunslinger is plainly a robot, and when it goes haywire, there’s nothing morally wrong about killing it.

The hosts in HBO’s Westworld are not only seamless humanoids, but from the start, they’ve been more complex and sympathetic than their fleshand-blood counterparts, who are consumed by pettiness, egotism, cruelty, greed and the other vices that come with being human. They also represent a profound shift in how the culture is coming to terms with artificial intelligence — a change that’s reflected, too, in Steven Spielberg’s recent Ready Player One, which grafts an entirely habitable virtual world that co-exists seamlessly with the real one.

There are more connections between the two works, which both draw heavily from the screen science fiction of the past but update it for a radically changed world. Spielberg directed Jurassic Park from Crichton’s 1990 novel, and we can see the original 1973 Westworld as a proto-Jurassic Park for Crichton, an early runthrough of the chaos theory that would upend an amusement doesn’t need us anymore.

Less than a month ago, the screen adaptation of Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One also reflected on the past and present, and how our relationship with machines has changed. By 2045, when the film opens, humans have rendered the planet virtually uninhabitable, a dystopia in which American cities are endless slums and the have-nots, like its hero, Wade Watts, are relegated to rickety trailer-park towers.

Their only escape is a virtual world called the OASIS, a pristine and endlessly malleable than any human.” In the latter, a military supercomputer has to be talked down from starting World War III. They’re not threatening to create new, superior worlds, like the OASIS or a Westworld run by the hosts. They’re threatening to obliterate the ones we have.

The new season of Westworld opens with the androids still in revolt against their human oppressors, but should they prevail, what will they do with their freedom? Perhaps they’ll enslave or destroy, just like the faceless CPUs in Tron and WarGames, or continue on a path of bloody revenge, like the Gunslinger in Crichton’s version. But it’s more likely that they’ll have to think about the future, too, and what the world will look like once they lay claim to it.

In this Western environment, they’re the new pioneers, running roughshod over the natives and seizing territory for themselves. It’s now their responsibility to figure out where their newfound agency takes them, and to live with the terrible mistakes they’ll surely make along the way.

In 2018, artificial intelligence is too integrated into everyday life for us to keep it at arm’s length — in conversations we have with Alexa or Siri, in the automation of industry, or in the hidden algorithms on Google ads and social media that monitor and accommodate our behaviour. We still worry about AI rebellion, but mainly over how it contributes to our own obsolescence.

The hosts in Westworld might be a more evolved species than we are, capable of creating idealized environments that reflect Wade’s description of the OASIS, “a place where the limits of reality are your own imagination.” In the future realms of Westworld and Ready Player One, it’s humans who are reduced to ghosts in the machine, infecting these newly independent artificial beings with all their flaws and moral lapses. Their glitches are our glitches, too.