Perspective 'Westworld' and 'Ready Player One' show how our relationship to artificial intelligence has changed

In the original film "Westworld" (1973), written and directed by an up-and-coming novelist named Michael Crichton, the Delos corporation operates a kind of Disney World for depraved adults, a series of amusement parks where they can interact with uncannily lifelike robots in various environments. The parks include Medievalworld and Romanworld, but the bulk of the movie's action takes place in Westworld, where visitors are invited to shoot at android attractions like the Gunslinger (Yul Brenner) without fear of retaliation. All that changes when a technical glitch spreads through the parks like a virus, and suddenly the hosts are attacking the guests, not the other way around. Of the many differences between Crichton's "Westworld" and the HBO version, which started its second season last Sunday, the most telling is the hands. For all their technical brilliance, the engineers in Crichton's film could never get the hands right: If visitors needed to tell who is and isn't a robot, they could look at the conspicuous silicon rings around the joints and know they weren't about to shoot (or otherwise violate) a human being.