Let the futurist explain AI show
When your TV series is about the creation of artificial intelligence, the origins of consciousness and consequences of mankind’s arrogance, it makes sense to have a futurist moderate a talk on your new season.
“Futurists develop datadriven models that describe plausible outcomes. Sometimes they’re catastrophic, sometimes they’re neutral, but always, they’re creative and pragmatic. I realize that sounds like [a] strange paradox,” Amy Webb, futurist and professor of strategic foresight at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said to The Times.
Webb led an intense discussion on the upcoming Season 3 of HBO’s “Westworld” at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con International with series creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy and actors Thandie Newton, Aaron Paul, Tessa Thompson, Evan Rachel Wood, Jeffrey Wright and surprise arrival Luke Hemsworth. Among the topics: the moral and ethical implications of artificial intelligence, free will and technology’s role in our lives, the actors’ lives and the characters portrayed on the show.
After asking about the characters — and that some thought to be dead were, in fact, on the stage — Webb launched into the first topic that let the audience know this was not going to be the normal fan/host Q&A: Are Nazis malware?
The question was rooted in an understanding of how the characters interact and have developed and how realistic their behavior is given the state of AI technology.
“In Season 2, we see the hosts gaining humanistic values, like empathy and revenge,” Webb told The Times. “Maeve, Dolores and Bernard are all learning just like we humans do using positive reinforcement techniques. It’s a good depiction of how AI systems are trained in real life. On the show, we see heritability too. Dr. Ford has encoded his values and goals into Dolores. And then, in Season 2, Dolores made decisions when she created Bernard. This reflects the real world of AI.”
At one point, Webb asked Thompson: As an actor, do you think you have free will?
“I like being in the moments where I feel like I don’t entirely have free will. It’s fun to be controlled by the masters like these [two],” said Thompson, referring to Nolan and Joy.
To Wright, Webb asked: “Did your character learn empathy or was it programmed?”
“Is it live or is it Memorex?” Wright replied. “That is the essential question of the show.”