Westworld reinvented the idea of evil AI with each season

polygon.com:

Last November, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that HBO series Westworld was canceled ahead of what would have been its fifth and final season. The surprising move was reportedly part of a string of cost-cutting efforts from the studio, and while it’s tough to endorse any action that immediately resulted in hundreds of people losing their jobs, Westworld may have a stronger legacy by concluding with its fourth-season finale.

Even discounting the show’s uneven quality over the years, Westworld’s final episode, “Que Será, Será,” offers an appropriately bleak and ambiguous ending for a story that spent years pondering different permutations of the Frankenstein problem, depicting the evolution of humanity’s fear of its own creative power from the traditional concept of “playing god” to its Internet Age successor: the terrifying prospect of creating god.

As far back as 1818, with Mary Shelley’s genre-defining novel Frankenstein, science fiction warned audiences that humanity’s technological development often outpaces its ethical development. As sci-fi evolved amid the scientific quantum leaps of the 20th century, readers, viewers, and players saw this fear of “playing god” codified in countless ways, but none fit the bill quite as perfectly as the notion of the “robot apocalypse.” The term “robot” itself has its origins in a 1921 Czech science fiction stage play commenting on the dehumanizing effect of industrialization. Stories of a robot uprising live at the nexus of our fears of being made obsolete by technology that creates and being made extinct by technology that destroys; it’s a Frankenstein for the Atomic Age. Will mankind, in its vanity and hubris, create the very thing that destroys it?

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