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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

Westworld reminded me a bit of Asimovs stories.

Coupling the whole robotics and AI thing. In Asimovs stories they first built the robots, which get smarter and smarter, but this is not how reality worked. Robots are rather specialized and most AI/automation we have today is about data, which is virtual.

They're all like, lets build a robot, then make it intelligent, but it should also move like a human, oh and why not replace their internals with life-like organs?

It's like they make a run through all science and engineering in about 30 years of development and pretend it's mostly the work of one master mind, which is ridicioulus. The whole "technical" side of Westworld is trash.

It's more a philosophical story than technical or psychological, with a few deus ex machina to get the ball rolling.

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> Westworld reminded me a bit of Asimovs stories.

I suspect this isn't an accident, given (some of) the same writers/producers are developing the Foundation series for HBO. There are MANY Asimovian themes scattered throughout the series, and even a few things I'm reasonably certain are direct references. (Ex: "Someday".)

> It's more a philosophical story than technical or psychological

And that's why I enjoyed it. My favorite science fiction always fits that description, especially if the big philosophical question comes around for technical reasons. (Such as in "The Cold Equations.") That, and the first season was very much a complete story. They could stop here and I'd be happy with it.

The series had its flaws, but I'm very optimistic if this is the shape of TV scifi to come. Even if it's all adaptations or of a derivative form.

I don't know... I think it's a nice show and the story telling is really awesome and the philosophical questions and their answers are really interesting.

But the rest feels a bit... meh.

The charaters don't have any depth.

Bernard and Ford had the most, but the rest?

The Maeve story-line was utter crap and the people around it wer basically imbecills, Maeve included.

William had something going on for him and when everything got together I was blown away, but only for a moment because some of the story telling puzzles were solved and not because he is a good character, his development is simply implausible.

Teddy is just... empty?

Dolores was okay, but since the whole story was about her uncovering her past and with it her personality, it took the show till the end of the season till she got some depth.

The scifi aspect is also minimal and basically a huge plothole, it's more fantasy to me.

Spoilers if you haven't watched.

The tech I can deal with, because they don't even try to explain it, and there was a nice moment where Maeve goes bonkers when confronted by the fact that she doesn't really have free will.

But my biggest gripe was that park security was a joke. It has a kind of Star Wars stupidity - "There's a problem down on the planet that could be hostile? Let's send the captain, first officer and chief medical officer". There's a problem in the park, so they send the head of security alone who conveniently can't get a signal back to base. And then there are the personnel who are wearing armour so ineffectual that they all drop like flies with a single bullet. You'd think that they might design weapons that were biometrically (or at least RFID-tagged to be realistic) linked to real people so they couldn't be stolen.

It seems like the entire park is manned by about 100 people. And until the final twist was revealed, I did wonder how the hell any of the chronology actually made sense - as in the starting town scene was being reset so often that it would be an insane clean-up job every night. Not to mention that there were parallel storylines where characters that had dependent stories seemed to be apart during resets e.g. Dolores and young William, Teddy and old William were being aired at the same time.

Ahem, I meant Star Trek...!

I was waiting for the author of the article to mention Asimov, but he never did :( It's too bad because Asimovs Three Laws of Robotics

1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws

do answer many of OP's points about goal oriented behaviour.

I think that if the show spent time covering how the tech came to be, it would just dilute the philosophical concentration of the series, which in my opinion, was extremely stimulating and appropriately delivered for television's standards. No I do not believe that Mr. Ford developed sentient beings with the help of just one other person, but who's to say he didn't just fork some open source framework (in his backstory, of course) and spend some ridiculous amount of an inherited wealth to make it all come true?

I had my share of disappointment as the show progressed, but it definitely added something to the mix that I was not expecting.

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