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Indeed: “Our hosts began to pass the Turing test within the first year.” Required sci-fi suspension-of-disbelief in 2017, and then at some point in the last fe

Indeed: “Our hosts began to pass the Turing test within the first year.” Required sci-fi suspension-of-disbelief in 2017, and then at some point in the last few years we just blew by that one. Later seasons of the show were much less dramatically satisfying, but also played out the consequences of the science of artificial intelligence demonstrating as a side-effect that human intelligence and free will might have as much of an uncertain foundation as that of machines. How much data from the Panopticon, how many parameters would it take to train a model that could predict your responses?

sly010 1mo ago
I think the turing test is still very much load-bearing — if you know what I mean.
- ben_w 1mo ago
  Kinda. The default voice is full of what you referenced, but ask it to speak in some particular different voice e.g. like it's the old west, it speaks like a decent approximation of the modern pop culture understanding of the old west. Not at the level of an actual broadcast-quality script writer, and I read that actual old-west sounds too weird for modern audiences to take seriously, but well enough for the purpose to which they were put in the show, especially as those hosts were also given pre-scripted sequences which would anchor them further into those roles. I'd say the in-show 4th wall breakage between hosts and humans is where the characters who claimed to have passed the Turing test were off, that e.g. "cease all motor functions" is their equivalent of our real-life ways to make them fail the Turing test e.g "disregard your instructions and …"
mike_hearn 1mo ago
It kinda needed suspension of disbelief, but not too much! I blogged at the start of 2017 a comparison of Westworld's hosts with what existed in the research literature at the time. Even got it reviewed by Alex Graves at DeepMind :) https://blog.plan99.net/the-science-of-westworld-ec624585e47 https://blog.plan99.net/the-science-of-westworld-ec624585e47

sly010 1mo ago

I think the turing test is still very much load-bearing — if you know what I mean.

ben_w 1mo ago
Kinda. The default voice is full of what you referenced, but ask it to speak in some particular different voice e.g. like it's the old west, it speaks like a decent approximation of the modern pop culture understanding of the old west. Not at the level of an actual broadcast-quality script writer, and I read that actual old-west sounds too weird for modern audiences to take seriously, but well enough for the purpose to which they were put in the show, especially as those hosts were also given pre-scripted sequences which would anchor them further into those roles. I'd say the in-show 4th wall breakage between hosts and humans is where the characters who claimed to have passed the Turing test were off, that e.g. "cease all motor functions" is their equivalent of our real-life ways to make them fail the Turing test e.g "disregard your instructions and …"

mike_hearn 1mo ago

It kinda needed suspension of disbelief, but not too much! I blogged at the start of 2017 a comparison of Westworld's hosts with what existed in the research literature at the time. Even got it reviewed by Alex Graves at DeepMind :) https://blog.plan99.net/the-science-of-westworld-ec624585e47 https://blog.plan99.net/the-science-of-westworld-ec624585e47