Westworld’s CES presentation gave glimpse into season 3/our bleak future

Westworld, a show about what happens when a collection of incredibly lifelike robots — called hosts — created to entertain people at a theme park gain sentience and strike out for themselves — has always loved a good stunt. Remember when it creeped everyone out ahead of season by plopping a lifelike robot in a pub?

It’s only gotten more ambitious since then. With season 3 coming this year, HBO is rolling out the high-concept marketing, including with a presentation at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which went down in Las Vegas. Mashable was on hand for the event, which was put on by a fake company called Incite Inc, and it sounds truly surreal.

For one thing, the organizers of the event were very social with the attendees, asking questions about minor details of their lives — Were they going to go through with that move to another city? How were their family and friends (whom they knew by name)? The point was that the organizers knew everything about the attendees just based on what they’d posted themselves online, which was unnerving to be confronted with.

Things got even odder once the presentation started. “Here at Incite, we’re about choices, the choices that people make that define their life,” said the presenter. “Our mission is using new and powerful technology in order to empower individuals to make their best choices. We believe that by revealing the pattern and calming the chaos, Incite can lead each of us to a better life, to a better you. Now, life doesn’t have to be as complicated and chaotic as it so often seems. Clarity is achievable and the possibilities are limitless.”

As a “case study,” the presented highlighted the life of someone purportedly in the audience, walking everyone through every important detail of their life. No one seemed sure whether it was real, but everyone was vaguely uncomfortable with the idea that it might be, which was probably the idea. “Big tech companies are profiting from your data,” the presenter continued. “But what are you getting back in return? We have more data than ever, we have more computing power, yet we live with even more uncertainty. Our information revolution should make us more sure about the future, not less. At Incite, we believe that we can do just that. We believe that by making your information work for you, we can relieve you of this burden of uncertainty. With our new technology, we can make the decisions that you did not know you wanted to make.”

"If you give us your data, we’ll give you certainty. If you give us your information, we can erase all doubt. The only way to get to this new world, the only decision that you need to make, is us. Thank you."

There were other ways this concept was layered into the event, like how the attendees dinner entrees were chosen for them based on surveyed they’d filled out beforehand, or how their responses were worked into statistics about uncertainly and anxiousness. Incite will play a role in the third season of Westworld — we know that from the fake commercial HBO put out a few months back — but clearly, it’s based on very real-world concerns about the role of technology in people’s lives. Would people be happier if tech companies made all their choices for them? Are we already giving them the opportunity by handing over our data, which we’re doing all the time if we’re online, whether we mean to or not?

The first couple of seasons of Westworld explored how machines could become more human. If this presentation is any indication, the third — which takes place in “the real world,” the hosts having broken out of their theme parks — will explore how humans are becoming more like machines. It sounds like it could be a good season of television, although it might keep me up at night more than I’d like.

I mean, did you hear that Warner Bros. is going to start using an AI to help it decide what movies to make? THE ROBOT REVOLUTION IS HERE, PEOPLE!

That’s probably going too far, but still, it’s food for thought. I haven’t always enjoyed actually watching Westworld, but I’ve always liked that it has a lot on its mind.

Westworld season 3 premieres on May 1.

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