I hadn’t intended to write about the entirely silly kerfuffle about whether or not Elon Musk gave a nazi salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration event on Monday, but then I remembered the abortive HBO show “Westworld”.
The premise of that show was that in the future, somebody had created effectively a living theme park, populated by humanoid robots that looked, talked, felt and even smelled like real humans – and even believed themselves to be real humans – but were effectively just characters in a real-world computer game with no choices. The guests could choose to sleep with them, murder them, torture or abuse them, with no real consequence. The murdered robots would simply be re-set and would resume their roles in the script the next day, when they might be murdered, raped, or whatever all over again by a different customer.
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