Tag Archives: Michael Crichton
HBO orders series based on Westworld
A lot of entertainment news that’s also relevant to class this week. While there are scant few details, it has been announced that HBO has ordered a TV series for next year based on the early-70’s Yul Brynner movie Westworld, whose plot revolved around a fantasy amusement park in which the actors are all androids. As you can guess, something goes wrong and the androids start running amok.
The movie was one of the very early looks at the potentialities of future technology, and of what we are beginning to face today in terms of robotics and artificial intelligence. In what was very forward-looking at the time, the androids actually started to act wacky because of something similar to a computer virus, an idea that was virtually unknown at the time. Remember that androids are different from robots, in that robots are mechanical devices whereas androids, supposedly, can look and act like humans, with skin, organs, and everything.
