Category Archives: Muddled Musings

Westworld’s Ctrl+Alt+Del Glitch

Székesfehérvár  

Westworld was one of those rarities in Hollywood: Entertainment that lived up to its stratospheric hype.

As beautiful as Game of Thrones and as brainy as the first season of True Detective, Westworld reaped the reward of zeitgeist, as its arrival timed nicely with the public’s surging interest in Alexa, Google Home, Siri — and the requisite debate over Artificial Intelligence.

And Westworld timed it all with the precision and thunder  of a  two-handed slam by Lebron James (another phenom who equaled expectations). You didn’t know who was human and who was human-ish. Which stories were real and which were just plotlines. The first season held its own against HBO debuts like The Sopranos, The Wire and Sex and the City. All had second seasons demonstrating freshman year was no fluke.

Alas, Westworld finds itself in a sophomore slump, one of its own design.

Who, exactly, are we supposed to root for in the second season? Season 1 (spoiler alert) culminated in a terrific finale as the machines became self-aware — and bent on revenge on the humans who imprisoned them in the futuristic theme park. It was a great story the first time around (the original movie came out in 1973) and proved just as powerful in the reboot.

Now, however, the show is lost for a hero. Is it the woman leading the cyborg onslaught? The humans who created the victims? Every story needs a reason to care about it. But Westworld still seeks a motivation beyond bloodlust (and the battles are bloody. And often nude.).

The problem is in Westworld‘s primary genetic design. It doesn’t lend itself to long format storytelling.

This is true for all films that rely on a shocking reveal. There’s a reason there was no sequel to The Crying Game (whose hero turned out to be a woman) or The Sixth Sense (whose hero turned out to be dead). Oh yeah, spoiler alerts. Those films realized that when you fool an audience the first time around, you get a more skeptical audience with each new chapter.

And that suspicion is powerful. It nearly ruined the career of M. Night Shyamalan, whose penchant for pulling the rug from under audiences’s feet became the bane of his career. Blade Runner 2049, the much-hyped sequel to the 1982 classic, collapsed under the same “fool me once” strategy. Ridley Scott’s sublime original left us to wonder who was human and who was a “skin job.” But those doubts left last year’s film an unmitigated failure: It cost $150 million and recouped only $92 million.

Westworld‘s own history suggested it was spawned in a troubling loop. MGM tried to milk the original franchise, launching a sequel, Futureworld, and a TV show, Beyond Westworld. The sequel was a critical and commercial flop, never recovering its  $2.5 million budget. The TV show lasted five episodes before it was canceled.

This doesn’t necessarily doom the new iteration. After all, the series smartly recruited Jonathan Nolan, whose short story brother Chris turned into Memento. That story, too, would never warrant a sequel. As in real life, once you learn characters aren’t who they say they are, you’re less likely to invest in their interests.

We get the Westworld message: Artificial intelligence will adopt the same failings as its human architects. But that also means your robots must face larger ethical issues than how to exact revenge. It’s not enough to be self-aware; you must make moral decisions based on that awareness.

And right now, you can’t help but be aware that Westworld’ one-trick pony act needs to learn new stunts.

 

 

 

 

Baby You Can Drive My Car

 

I took my first Uber ride this week.

That embarrassing acknowledgement comes as part confession, part contrition, and part caustic admission that I was wrong and need to own it.

For years, I railed against the ride sharing service, as I’m want to do with so many 21st century things. I’ll still never forgive my colleagues for allowing the term “social media” to take hold. And we did allow it — how else would it spread through popular culture? The American Surgery Association, a real thing, never would  recognize the term “social surgeon.” The Federal Aviation Administration would laugh your ass out the door if you applied for a “social pilot” license.

Yet not so with cars, even though there are 1.3 million traffic deaths a year, according to the National Highway Traffic Administration. That’s 3,287 deadly car crashes a day.

And Uber was suffering additional concerns. There was the fatal accident by a self-driving Uber in Arizona. And Jason Brian Dalton, the Uber driver from Kalamazoo who shot 6 people to death between fares in 2016.

But in truth, what  gave me pause was the “training” regimen required for all Uber drivers: a 13-minute YouTube video.  Everything a licensed cabbie must demonstrably learn about driving laws, legal liability, customer service, etc., could be neatly wrapped up watching that video, according to Silicon Valley. That says a lot about one of two industries, I’m not sure which.

The video is below, in its entirety. If you watch it, you’re technically Uber-approved to run a personal taxi service (though I wonder how many Uber drivers actually watched it).

That never cut it with me. I would rather drive myself, I rationalized, rather than trust a stranger in a deceptively deadly exercise in a vehicle I knew nothing about.

What an idiot.

Confession: I’m a YouTube junkie. Documentaries. Converted podcasts. Stanford lectures (brilliant idea). Animals doing funny shit (I am human, after all).

And it was on the unofficial lecture circuit I learned of the Cognitive Bias Codex, a map as complex as a New York subway. Evolutionary psychologists officially describe it as this: “Cognitive biases can be organized into four categories: biases that arise from too much information, not enough meaning, the need to act quickly, and the limits of memory. The biases can result in a departure from normative behavior and rationality.”

But isn’t that just a long way of saying you mistakenly believe you know what people are thinking — including yourself? The codex doesn’t have enough room on a circle to fit them all. When I gave up trying to learn the first definition and learned to accept the second, I realized my unwarranted bias against Uber.

After all, they are taking a bigger risk than me in the chance meeting. They are doing it for money. I do it in distraction. Speaking of which, I also had to face it: I suck at driving. They are more likely to be protective of their car than  I am, even in my own.

So I bit the bullet, downloaded the app, and scheduled a ride to the poker game that night.

Why was I nervous? What was the etiquette? Do I sit in the front seat or back? Do I tip him/her? Did they know they were popping my Uber cherry? I actually checked myself in the mirror and waited on the front patio like  an anxious prom date.

But my nerves began to ease when I paid more attention to the app itself. It pinged me two minutes before he was to arrive. The driver, an elderly Middle Eastern man in an immaculate Honda Civic hybrid, had been on 5,204 5-star rides in his two-and-a-half years at Uber. As his car approached, I could watch it block by block on the app’s GPS. So distracted was I, he had to gently beep twice when he stopped in front.

Alas, the driver either didn’t know he was taking my Uber virginity, or didn’t care. He was quiet as a monk and as cautious as a soccer mom. The ride cost me $11.33. I don’t know what a taxi would have cost. But I do know that if cab services aren’t implementing their own apps with similar GPS services, their time on this Earth will be shorter than that of newspapermen.

While I’m sure I’ll continue to bray against the do-it-yourself, asshole-economy, I have to admit I’d rather someone else deal with traffic.

Even a robot.

 

 

 

 

Factslaps are back, dear bitches:

  • A study using MRI scans showed that the brains of people who exercise moderately look 10 years younger than those who don’t.
  • Installed in 1410, the world’s oldest astronomical clock is still in operation is in Prague.
  • The world’s most expensive perfume is Clive Christian No 1 Passant Guardant. It costs $143,000 for 30ml and comes in a flask studded with 2,000 diamonds.
  • A recent  study found that 80% of mass shooters showed no interest in violent video games.
  • Scientists at the University of Alberta spent seven years working out that human urine contains 3,079 different chemical compounds.
  • Studies have suggested that losses are, psychologically, twice as powerful as gains. So winning $100 feels as good to us as losing $50 feels bad.
  • Research has shown that dogs actually like the silly, high-pitched voice their owners use to talk to them.
  • Ben & Jerry learned how to make ice cream by taking a $5 correspondence course offered by Penn State, because one of them couldn’t get into medical school and the other couldn’t sell enough pottery.