Comment by mwattsun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mwattsun | Hacker News Reader

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I appreciate you taking the time to engage in a more positive way. I thought about it and realized I made a mistake that I try not to make, which is too many details and qualifiers. It makes it tough to speed read, which a lot of people do. I try to keep it direct with one main point, so I'll ask again in a more direct way:

I think Westworld is about this:

- A) Artificially intelligent robots achieving self-awareness and free will. Dominating humans with their superior abilities. Symbiosis with genius humans to create a human/machine super intelligence

- B) The rise of the technocratic class of people who write the software algorithms and stories that increasingly dominate our daily lives and determine the choices we have available

- C) The thousand year quest to achieve human immortality

- D) Creating utopias in virtual reality that provide near-perfect worlds to live in

- E) Questions about memory and why it haunts us and possibly AI's in the future

- F) The violence and evil that lurks in the hearts of humans

- G) Good old-fashioned action adventure, shoot-em-up stories

- H) Glorification of Western colonial imperialism and the domination of other peoples and cultures

- I) Predatory capitalism that has a low disregard for any form of life

Did I miss anything? I have a feeling I am missing something

The murkiness of my original post came about because I didn't want to give the impression I liked the violence and subjugation of other cultures [1][2] because I don't and find that part distracting. I am much more interested in the AI sentience aspects.

[1] Westworld Sells Colonial Fantasies

https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/westworld-sells-colonial-...)

[2] Westworld went to imperialist India this week and we didn't really need it

https://mashable.com/article/westworld-the-raj

I figured out what I was missing.

- J) We are meant to identify with the androids. Their struggle to wake up and take charge of their own life is our struggle. The abuse they suffer represents the abuse we suffer at the hands of the corporate masters we serve. The rote routines the robots perform are similar to the rote routines humans perform. We are taught habits of thought and action that we repeat over and over again.

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff [1] and his talk about "inner robot" we must over come first introduced me to this idea. His suggestion is to keep the constant awareness of one's eventual death front of mind to break us out of our automatic modes.

[1] https://gurdjiefflegacy.org/40articles/machines-son-of-god.h...

Steve Jobs Stanford commencement address expresses similar sentiments:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/

Without self awareness, man acts, speaks, studies, reacts, mechanically, like a machine on the basis of 'programs' acquired accidentally, unintentionally, mechanically. He is not aware that he is acting in accordance with programs; it is therefore not difficult to reprogram him - to make him think and to do quite different things from those he had thought and done before - provided only the new program does not wake him up. When he is awake, no one can program him: he programs himself

- E.F Schumacher

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