First off, two nuggets
of weirdness I’d like to share with my beloved readers, whoever you might be.
I went to buy beer at
the Safeway, a regional supermarket.
Beer is an “age-restricted item”, which requires a Safeway Authority
Figure to verify my State-Issued Vehicle Operation ID to make sure a child is
not purchasing low-potency alcoholic beverages.
In her casual haste to fulfil her duties, the SAF entered my year of
birth as 1169, prompting the Cashier Computer to go into “WTF” mode, meaning I
would have to bring my purchase from the self-checkout register to the Actual Flesh
& Blood Store Cashier register. Once
the Cashier verified I was 52 years old, instead of 852 years old, my beer
purchase was finally consummated. And
there was much rejoicing.
Then, the weather
report. As my hearing is well below
milspec (which is why I’m an attorney and not an Army-trained killing machine)
I have the TV thing set with captions.
And in the wintery time, in a place such as Northern former Confederate
State Virginia which sometimes sees that snow stuff, obviously that possibility
was germane to weather reporting.
However, the captioning indicated that because the temperature would be
rising above freezing, the snow would transition to “eyes”. Raining eyes?
Really? Now that’s a form of
precipitation I’ve never seen. Imagine
that. We’re all Mortys living in Rick’s
world.
I’ve been plowing
through Westworld, Season 3. Whereas
season 1 & 2 took place in the “park” area, somewhere in Utah, season 3
takes us out to the real world, as the Hosts (Androids) manage to determine how
to survive on their own. Aaron Paul, aka
Jesse Pinkman from “Breaking Bad”, is here as veteran with PTSD who ends up
working with Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood). Of course, the #1 issue is always, who is a
guest (human) and who is a host (android)?
Biological
Functions. This came up during “Blade
Runner”, the early 80s sci-fi film based on PKD’s book, Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep, with Harrison Ford as Deckard, an assassin who takes out
rogue replicants (androids), the main one being Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer). Replicants are hardwired with a two year
lifespan, which Batty is trying to fix, only to find that it can’t be
fixed. Then the faux-clever question is,
“is Deckard himself a replicant”? First
off, if he was doing it for more than 2 years, then no. But here’s another big issue.
Humans have these things
called biological functions. We eat,
drink, poop, pee, sleep, get sick, age, and die. Androids need at least some power source, but
beyond that there’s no reason to program them with all those biological
functions. Why do so??? That would be
like retro-engineering a modern car with the same features as a Model T. Best to keep androids the way they are and
not worry about making them replicate humans.
The really stupid thing
is that aside from plot reasons, there’s no reason to show people in movies or
TVs shows peeing or pooing, or getting sick.
So those occur off-camera, presumably, for any character who is
human. If you’re uncertain if you’re a
human or a robot, the simple deal is: do
you get hungry and have to eat? If you
eat, do you poo? Do you get older and
sick? The narrative of “Westworld”
occurs over 20-30 years, and we see at least one human character age so much
he’s played by two completely different actors at those different times. But all the hosts – the most notable being Dolores
(Evan Rachel Wood) and Meave (Thandie Newton) look exactly the same. Well, of course: an advantage of androids is that they don’t
age and are theoretically immortal.
The catch is, how does a
HUMAN get to enjoy that immortality? How
do you transfer your consciousness from your meatbag, aging, peeing and pooing
shell, into that sleek, non-aging host body?
So far as I can tell, none of the guests from Westworld made that
transition. They can make host copies of
guests, but while the copies might have memories of the guest, there is no
continuity of consciousness; the host is just a copy, the original person
eventually dies. The best they can do is
reduce all the hosts’ personalities and memories to a small globe which can be
removed and inserted into any other host body.
They can also make copies of these globes and inhabit multiple host
bodies simultaneously. Think of how the
narrative might change with that possibility.
Anyhow, none of us are androids and unlikely to be one anytime soon, or
ever.
Robocop. One scenario where it did happen, albeit
under somewhat suboptimal circumstances.
In the first movie, Detroit, facing an unruly police union, decides to
avoid the issue by making robot cops: a robo-cop made from somewhat deceased
cop, Murphy (Peter Weller). Robocop
starts off as a robot, but Murphy’s prior memories leach back in. In Robocop 2, they pull the brain, eyes and
spinal cord of the subject (truly evil bad guy) into a second generation
robot. They had to use the bad guy, Cain;
the good guys they tried it with first immediately killed themselves. Is this a truly practical solution? Probably not.
In any case, the
insanely rich and well funded Delos Corp never seemed to manage to figure out
how to transplant an original guest consciousness into a host body: the best they could do was somehow copy the
humans into a very convincing android who supposedly had the original’s
personality and memories. But if the
original human simply died at some point, what’s the point of all these android
copies? It doesn’t do the original human
any good, and doesn’t solve the ultimate problem.
The other issue is that
our brains have limited memory capacity.
Once we reach that limit, new memories are only acquired at the expense
of old ones. So if you could live to be 1000,
but your brain can only reliably store 100 years worth of memories, which of
those do you retain? That would be 10%.
Then if you live to be 2,000, we’re talking 5%, and so on. This sounds like a problem which will never
be fixed no matter how brilliant the scientists are. Let’s talk to Dr. Strange…
