The second day of the 2017 Vanity Fair Summit is off to quite the start, as WESTWORLD creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy eluded to the possibility of introducing two new theme parks for the next season of HBO's sci-fi television epic. We've already seen robots run amuck in the Wild West, and now it sounds as if both a Roman World and Medieval World are being prepped for the show's sophomore season. Of course, these plans will come as no surprise to fans who enjoyed Michael Crichton’s original 1973 movie based on the WESTWORLD property.
In the original film, Westworld wasn't the only amusement park locale that guests were permitted to visit. Delos, the company behind the Western-themed vacation grounds, had also created a Medieval World and Roman World in which guests could live out their fantasies of becoming heroes, villains or on-lookers in a foreign land. Furthermore, Crichton penned a sequel to the story in 1976, which introduced readers to a Future World, and I for one am really hoping for that attraction in particular to be a part of Season 3.
While participating in the summit, Nolan and Joy elaborated on the the advancement of Artificial Intelligence technology, and how the delicate nature of our technological triumphs as inventors are at the core of the show's overall theme.
“I feel evenly split between the fear that A.I. will enslave us and make us do its bidding and my fear that it won’t,” Nolan explained. “If you look at things that have gone down in the last year, humans are terrible at running this world. It’s clear that there’s room for improvement.” He was optimistic about the idea that systems “can yield dramatic improvements in a way our world functions.”
Joy then followed up on Nolan's words with some of her own, “People like to ask, ‘Why would A.I. want to be evil and destroy us?'” Joy said comparing it to the goal of a corporation. “A corporation’s goal is to make profits. It’s very simple. It’s binary. It’s either less or more. Computers work along the same thing. If you can see how, with the simplest of directives that can get blown into something beyond what could image, that’s the kind of thing we’re talking about.”
Look, we all know that, one day, Chuck E. Cheese, Disney's The Country Bears and the Hall of Presidents will become sentient and either destroy or enslave us all. You might be sitting there and rolling your eyes at me now, but you'll see. With the WESTWORLD creators hinting at not one, but two new worlds for patrons to explore, what sort of plots are you imagining for these bold, new settings? How do you think Evan Rachel Wood's Delores Abernathy will tie into the mix? Let us know your theories in the comments section below.
WESTWORLD will return to HBO in the Spring of 2018.