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Bust Rodd posted:I think that season 2 needs to tell a very different kind of story than “But who IS robots? Time?” And people are gonna tune in and want more sex robot cowboys and it will be less about that so they will think it is bad Westworld Season 2: But who IS robots? Time?
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Dec 6, 2017 11:05
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Yadoppsi posted:Folks, he previous Westworld thread sure talked up the work J Nolan put into Person of Interest but couldn't get into the serial procedural first episodes. Is it better as a binge and is there a season or episode I should skip to where you think it starts to get really good? http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/04/22/person-of-interest-the-episodes-that-will-catch-you-up
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Dec 6, 2017 12:44
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Norwegian Rudo posted:http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/04/22/person-of-interest-the-episodes-that-will-catch-you-up Just read the 1st page of the article. That'll be pretty much essential stuff for S01 and S02. The next page gets into some mild (and potentially big) spoilers. Not on anyone plot point, but just fact that some things have happened or exist. Even though it leaves out some good episodes, follow the guide for S01 and S02. S03 is where the show shifts from procedural of the week to the serialized plot being in the driver seat. Watch all of S03, S04 and S05.
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Dec 6, 2017 13:03
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LostRook posted:Show might be getting delayed again: https://twitter.com/WLV_investor/status/938410022538682368
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Dec 6, 2017 17:58
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Ummm.... that's a pretty familiar sign to me. THAT's what it looks like out there today, right next to UCLA? I'm gonna go check outside. For once one of these is actually close.
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Dec 7, 2017 00:55
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Snappy Zings posted:Westworld Season 2: But who IS robots? Time? I’m so glad someone found that as funny as I did.
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Dec 7, 2017 05:15
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I really liked Westworld, except i kind of hated most of the robot revolution when it finally happened. The stuff with the idiot technicians felt really god damned stupid and contrived, and that's probably why it's played for comedy, but I still don't like it because the payoff is an unfunny, unearned rampage. When they're finally making their escape it's a badass moment in a vacuum but in context it's a cheeseball moment loving up the tension in the wider story and man that entire plot did not remotely earn that conclusion. and every other plot gets a pretty good conclusion. Dolores' awakening works, as does Bernard's journey. Maeve and the gang get the video game equivalent of the debug menu and just the way that poo poo breaks the game, it breaks the story and it breaks a lot of what the rest of the show had to say about ~*Deep Thangs*~ by reducing self awareness and the maze to a set of sliders a handful of robots can set to "Demigod" and go on a massacre with. What I'm saying is I hope Maeve's journey into being a revolutionary becomes, i dunno, interesting, instead of a video game plotline. It's kind of meta that it plays out that way, but it doesn't make it good or entertaining to watch. All those negative words, but still insanely hyped for season 2.
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Dec 7, 2017 10:42
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basic hitler posted:What I'm saying is I hope Maeve's journey into being a revolutionary becomes, i dunno, interesting, instead of a video game plotline. It's kind of meta that it plays out that way, but it doesn't make it good or entertaining to watch. Maeve's journey was the most interesting part of the series for me, right up until she, Hector, and Armistice start their rampage where I ended up being somewhat disappointed for many of the reasons you mentioned. Though I'm not sure she's as free as she thinks she is. She have a ton of Lucifer imagery associated with her throughout the season (even before she starts self-immolating while cackling so that she can start a revolution in heaven), but she, noticeably, doesn't leave the park when she can. I know she does it because of a flashback to her "daughter", but giving the hosts internally consistent justifications for their actions, that he nevertheless controls, has been Ford's MO for awhile. And depending on your theology, Lucifer's rebellion was part of God's plan, and Ford is at the very least the Demiurge. Either way, she's probably the plot-line I'm most interested about going forward. Her ending didn't live up to the buildup, while the other storylines certainly did.
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Dec 7, 2017 17:35
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Ravenfood posted:..but she, noticeably, doesn't leave the park when she can. This jumped out at me when I watched it too. I was thinking "suuuuure you can leave. Anytime you want, right? You're just turning away because you happened to think of rescuing your daughter right before you boarded the departure car." She only subverted the code she can get to. It's probably like a VM running over a deeper layer that's completely hidden from everyone. Also, I agree regarding the violent insurrection in the corporate offices. She gets set up over the season on how she's an extremely intelligent manipulator and getting some gunslingers to slaughter everyone is her plan? If she really wanted to maximize her escape, she'd do it with the least amount of casualties possible. Which maybe that's the point. Maybe it's part of the deeper code that may or may not be present that lead to the wanton violence. Jonathan Nolan has earned the benefit of the doubt with regards to all of this being deliberate story telling that have convincing reasons within the confines of the show. Person of Interest showed me he can deliver a story where events can have deep and subtle effects in the long term, and everything is happening for a reason.
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Dec 7, 2017 18:01
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Proteus Jones posted:This jumped out at me when I watched it too. I was thinking "suuuuure you can leave. Anytime you want, right? You're just turning away because you happened to think of rescuing your daughter right before you boarded the departure car." Didn’t we see that Ford’s decision tree for her involved commands to leave and infiltrate the mainland? I thought the point of her staying was that it was her will asserting itself for the first time, although having been determined by her prior life not under her own control it’s obviously not total freedom of will.
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Dec 7, 2017 18:21
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basic hitler posted:I really liked Westworld, except i kind of hated most of the robot revolution when it finally happened. The stuff with the idiot technicians felt really god damned stupid and contrived, and that's probably why it's played for comedy, but I still don't like it because the payoff is an unfunny, unearned rampage. When they're finally making their escape it's a badass moment in a vacuum but in context it's a cheeseball moment loving up the tension in the wider story and man that entire plot did not remotely earn that conclusion. and every other plot gets a pretty good conclusion. Dolores' awakening works, as does Bernard's journey. Maeve and the gang get the video game equivalent of the debug menu and just the way that poo poo breaks the game, it breaks the story and it breaks a lot of what the rest of the show had to say about ~*Deep Thangs*~ by reducing self awareness and the maze to a set of sliders a handful of robots can set to "Demigod" and go on a massacre with. I hate to say it for your sake, but I think a lot of that was intentional. The Nolans specifically cited video games as an influence and even mentioned the perspective of NPCs in games like GTA so... 
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Dec 7, 2017 18:37
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business hammocks posted:Didn’t we see that Ford’s decision tree for her involved commands to leave and infiltrate the mainland? I thought the point of her staying was that it was her will asserting itself for the first time, although having been determined by her prior life not under her own control it’s obviously not total freedom of will. It also makes the motivations for "burn it all" that much more opaque, since you think whoever investigates would be going over things with a fine-tooth comb and Maeve is clever enough to want to avoid showing her hand as much as possible. Proteus Jones fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Dec 7, 2017 |
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Dec 7, 2017 18:41
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business hammocks posted:Didn’t we see that Ford’s decision tree for her involved commands to leave and infiltrate the mainland? I thought the point of her staying was that it was her will asserting itself for the first time, although having been determined by her prior life not under her own control it’s obviously not total freedom of will. We did, yes. I just thought it was interesting that her trigger for staying was closely related to her initial awakening, which was also the same event that revitalized the Man in Black's interest in the hosts as being "truly alive", and also that she'd been having those flashbacks regularly. Maybe it is her moment of free will, but it being so closely tied to that event in particular was significant to me. It certainly could be an independent decision and her first "real" choice, but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't.
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Dec 7, 2017 18:46
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I assumed that Maeve & co.’s attack was planned/foreseen by Ford as a way to preoccupy all of the park’s security staff while Dolores and the rest begin their uprising.
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Dec 8, 2017 00:43
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I like to think Ford only made that small change Felix mentioned in the beginning, more suspicion and self preservation. After that, it was just predictable Maeve would escape and go on a rampage and turn her brain power up to maximum. I like it because it implies the robots are all capable of becoming super powerful and taking over the building at any time. It just takes the slightest nudge to make it happen.
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Dec 8, 2017 01:09
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sweetmercifulcrap posted:I assumed that Maeve & co.’s attack was planned/foreseen by Ford as a way to preoccupy all of the park’s security staff while Dolores and the rest begin their uprising. I though Ford's plan was for Maeve to get out into The Real World and start infiltrating and poo poo.
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Dec 8, 2017 03:08
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Astroman posted:I though Ford's plan was for Maeve to get out into The Real World and start infiltrating and poo poo. Maybe? Or maybe he subverted it with something subtle in her code so it appears to her that she's exercising free-will.
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Dec 8, 2017 03:12
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I just remembered my favorite part of the show, which is the concept that these robots (Bernard, Maeve) each crossed over into actually being sentient at the moment of key traumatic life events, as a direct result of them. After all of Arnold's struggles to figure out the key to "strong AI" / consciousness, he concludes that anything that suffers becomes alive and sentient. Pain, discomfort, and the desire for the external world to be different is all that separates the robots, and us as well, from being mindless algorithms that just do data processing. Which has the implication that as soon as we humans eliminate suffering entirely from ourselves in a post scarcity society, we are done for and are no longer sentient. Today we already find it easy to think of AIs as non-sentient shells, and so many of us can't even imagine AI ever becoming more than that (sometimes for lack of imagination of what increasingly general purpose AI will be capable of, or sometimes due to bad philosophical arguments about consciousness being inseparable from biological cells). But in a world where all suffering is solved, this show is saying that what little faith that we extend to other *people* that they are even sentient and feel things and aren't mere information processors, we'd have no more reason to keep extending. For all we know we might as well each view everyone else as mindless zombies at that point, walking around without meaningful goals or reasons to empathize with anyone else, because we know that none of them can suffer. edit: Since this philosophical statement is kind of a central thesis of Season 1 maybe there could be a place in the OP for it? The summary is a great read and brought me right back into remembering most of the show but I still had forgotten about that idea until now. Good work on touching it up since I last saw it by the way Happy Thread fucked around with this message at 03:49 on Dec 8, 2017 |
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Dec 8, 2017 03:36
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That’s a prominent argument about AI in general...not necessarily suffering specifically, but the notion of resource scarcity or constraint as a prerequisite for consciousness. That some actual economy behind survival, or positive vs. negative experience, drives consciousness. “BabyX” is an attempt at this. It’s an AI baby that uses computer vision and so on to “interact” with people. It recognizes faces, employs machine learning, and has responses to stimuli. But the interesting part is that it has “emotional states,” has algorithms that link positive or negative input to various simulated variables for “happiness” or “sadness.” If you neglect it, the lack of input decreases that variable, and it’s programmed to want to increase it and will “cry” to encourage attention. The point is to artificially create a body-sense of lack or scarcity that it needs to correct. It senses injury. The data could be called “pain.”
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Dec 8, 2017 11:39
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Dumb Lowtax posted:Pain, discomfort, and the desire for the external world to be different is all that separates the robots, and us as well, from being mindless algorithms that just do data processing. I'd argue pain, discomfort and so on are just one layer of data processing / a simply more sophisticated algorithm.
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Dec 8, 2017 14:56
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LinkesAuge posted:I'd argue pain, discomfort and so on are just one layer of data processing / a simply more sophisticated algorithm. Well, that's more or less our brains, just a bunch of heuristic algorithms running in a highly parallelized state. "Consciousness" is probably emergent phenomenon of that. As for Free Will, if it exists it's vanishingly rare as most of us Skinner Box our way through our lives assigning post-hoc rationalizations to every action we take milliseconds after.
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Dec 8, 2017 15:00
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Maybe Shogun World will have a Chinese Room in beta stashed away somewhere and the show will address these questions directly.
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Dec 8, 2017 15:02
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“Hey I been thinking...” “Oh here we go again with this this.” “I’m telling you, we shouldn’t make them super strong.” “Dude what is even the point of building Androids if they aren’t super strong?” “They’re cowboys, they don’t need to be super anything.” “Look we’ve been over this...” “I’m just saying why would we purposely make them so smart and fast and strong and then program all this gun fighting in. Even with just the gun programs they would just wreck our security.” “Dude, they are androids, we’re building then with super strength and speed and extensive knowledge of 19th century firearms and this will obviously never backfire.” “... have you even seen Terminator?” “That movie is for Grandpas dude, it’s like 100 years old.” “Dude come over tonight you should see this.”
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Dec 8, 2017 15:04
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Bust Rodd posted:“Hey I been thinking...” LOL Yeah, the show should be titled Westworld: WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG
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Dec 8, 2017 15:09
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I'm late to the Person of Interest discussion here, but I started out bored and not feeling the procedural aspect. Don't worry -- it gets exponentially better, to the point where it became one of my all-time favorite shows. I'd recommend watching the first episode to get the general idea, then maybe the one with Linda Cardellini as a doctor (episode 3 or 4?), then skip to 7 with Michael Emerson as a teacher, and that is THE POINT where you'll hopefully be into it enough to continue. I think there were one or two more boring procedural episodes after that, but then by episode 10, things get really good and ramp up from there. If you don't like it after 7 and I think 10, you may not like it at all.
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Dec 8, 2017 17:27
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Yeah just do yourself a favor and watch POI until it hooks you. It won’t take that long and it’s awesome. It probably took me 2-3 attempts to watch the first few episodes before it grabbed the living gently caress out of me and I binged all 5 or so seasons in like 3 weeks. Edit: I watched the show thanks to the first season westworld thread, someone gave me this exact same advice and I’m glad I listened. Harton fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Dec 8, 2017 |
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Dec 8, 2017 18:33
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Dumb Lowtax posted:I just remembered my favorite part of the show, which is the concept that these robots (Bernard, Maeve) each crossed over into actually being sentient at the moment of key traumatic life events, as a direct result of them. After all of Arnold's struggles to figure out the key to "strong AI" / consciousness, he concludes that anything that suffers becomes alive and sentient. Pain, discomfort, and the desire for the external world to be different is all that separates the robots, and us as well, from being mindless algorithms that just do data processing. If you post it I will add it!
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Dec 8, 2017 22:48
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Proteus Jones posted:LOL Westworld: HOLD MY BEER
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Dec 9, 2017 02:23
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Harton posted:Yeah just do yourself a favor and watch POI until it hooks you. It won’t take that long and it’s awesome. It probably took me 2-3 attempts to watch the first few episodes before it grabbed the living gently caress out of me and I binged all 5 or so seasons in like 3 weeks. I just finished a rewatch of the entire series myself. It's a hell of a TV show and easily in my all-time top 5. Everyone should give it a shot while waiting for this to return.
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Dec 9, 2017 07:22
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Professor Shark posted:If you post it I will add it! I don't think I can do the idea justice beyond just what I noticed from that post  I bet there are some really deep analysis people closer to the production and "in the know" of the show's intentions have made about the suffering = life aspect of the show. It just appeals to me a lot, because it seems plausible that we feel the most alive when we are suffering, and that happiness is more an idea we chase rather than a state we enter long-term so that's not the one that makes us sentient.
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Dec 9, 2017 07:59
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I still don't quite get the logistics of how the park works timeline-wise, like the duration of a stay, and how often guests arrive. Is everything first-come, first-served? Like if I wanted to try the Dolores storyline on a visit, would I just be out of luck because William bogarted her for 30 years? It seems like the workers reset everything pretty immediately but other storylines take multiple days to complete.
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Dec 9, 2017 09:50
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sticklefifer posted:I still don't quite get the logistics of how the park works timeline-wise, like the duration of a stay, and how often guests arrive. Is everything first-come, first-served? Like if I wanted to try the Dolores storyline on a visit, would I just be out of luck because William bogarted her for 30 years? It seems like the workers reset everything pretty immediately but other storylines take multiple days to complete. Best not to think too much about that, IMO.
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Dec 9, 2017 14:56
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flatluigi posted:I just finished a rewatch of the entire series myself. It's a hell of a TV show and easily in my all-time top 5. Everyone should give it a shot while waiting for this to return. I can still remember when I was just a couple episodes in on S5 and while I knew, step by step, how the show got to this place narratively, I was still stunned at how a crime procedural slowly morphed into a dark, Orwellian science fiction serial. I am still amazed that this show: a) was on CBS of all stations. They are *not* known for shows that subvert formula. b) lasted long enough for Nolan to wrap up and end the show properly.
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Dec 9, 2017 15:08
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I’m watching POI S1 right now and I feel like you guys paint it with a bad brush. I’m 5 episodes in and it’s like a fun, inverted crime procedural because the main character isn’t a cop and is constantly doing cool crimes. All the forensic stuff and hacking is hand-waved instantly without meaningless graphics and Reese is either doing sweet CIA spy poo poo or beating dudes savagely and Finch is like a fun little Oracle dude. I’m enjoying the mystery and haven’t been bored at all, although I am very curious to see how the scope of this show expands because for this show to go some of the places you’ve mentioned it’s gonna have to take off in a pretty big way. I’m just like allergic to NCIS or SVU I think those shows are lowest common denominator extreme garbo and this so far better than any other cop show and this is apparently the most boring season? Heck yeah!
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Dec 9, 2017 15:11
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Bust Rodd posted:I’m watching POI S1 right now and I feel like you guys paint it with a bad brush. I’m 5 episodes in and it’s like a fun, inverted crime procedural because the main character isn’t a cop and is constantly doing cool crimes. I think we look back at S1 and "paint it with a bad brush", because compared to the roller coaster ride this show becomes, S1 is almost like a completely different show. However, I'm fan of watching through the entire season, especially for first watch. I think there are important character and plot beats sprinkled throughout that the other 4 use as a foundation.
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Dec 9, 2017 15:17
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Bust Rodd posted:I’m watching POI S1 right now and I feel like you guys paint it with a bad brush. I’m 5 episodes in and it’s like a fun, inverted crime procedural because the main character isn’t a cop and is constantly doing cool crimes. Report back after episode 7. Like I said, that's the first one that starts making you think there will be more going on.
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Dec 9, 2017 16:36
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I had just liked the series until 'Witness' aired...after that, I was pretty much obsessed with seeing what would happen next.
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Dec 9, 2017 17:35
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sticklefifer posted:I still don't quite get the logistics of how the park works timeline-wise, like the duration of a stay, and how often guests arrive. Is everything first-come, first-served? Like if I wanted to try the Dolores storyline on a visit, would I just be out of luck because William bogarted her for 30 years? It seems like the workers reset everything pretty immediately but other storylines take multiple days to complete. Early on they say that there are about 2,000 hosts in the park and 1,400 guests, though honestly the number of guests seems lower than that. Either way, there are enough hosts for guests to befriend and adventure with/engage in their storylines that everyone should be able to do something interesting. Also, consider that Dolores is not a unique experience to most guests - most of them probably never meet her. She is only special to the audience. As far as resetting, if the hosts are engaged with guests for a multiple day storyline or mission, they are not reset. If they are killed or finish the day without being engaged with a guest, their loop resets. Somewhere in the promotional material I believe it stated that you start out with a certain amount of "in-game currency", and it's up to you to decide how you spend it and get more. There's probably one arrival and departure every day.
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Dec 10, 2017 04:48
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Professor Shark posted:
I'm re-watching season 1 and I think that Ford is the man that built a house at the center of the maze that keeps coming back after he dies
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Dec 18, 2017 03:25
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