8) An Intelligent Take On Artificial Intelligence
There’s no denying that we’ve had a glut of TV and movies about artificial intelligence over the past few years, from indie sci-fi flick Ex Machina to superhero blockbuster Avengers: Age of Ultron. You might presume, then, that yet another show dabbling in that arena wouldn’t have anything new to add. Well, think again, because Westworld might have similar themes to those aforementioned films, but it’s one of the fullest and most intelligent explorations of the idea we’ve seen in a while.
One thing that’s refreshing about it is that it’s mostly told from the androids’ perspective. As well as being a nifty narrative device to keep the audience on their toes – which ones are real and which are robots? – it also allows us to view the horror that the so-called Hosts go through each day only to be wiped clean and left with no memory by the next morning. As such, another important theme concerns the extent to which our identities are tied to our memories. Are the Hosts not truly people because they live each day afresh like goldfish in a bowl? We’ll have to decide the answer to that as the series goes on.
