Where Is 'Westworld' in Real Life?

The HBO series 'Westworld' finished its run in August 2022

ChatGPT let one thing finally sink in: The dawn of artificial intelligence is upon us. The arrival of the AI chatbot got many of us asking ourselves some pretty serious, existential questions. 

Things like, "Where exactly is Westworld?"

The simple answer is that the fictional android paradise and its mother theme park, Delos, are in the Philippines, specifically around the island of Palawan.

Jeffrey Wright as Bernard Lowe (left) arrives at the fish port of Rizal in Palawan, Philippines (right via Iamsandraguia) 

We know this much from Season 3 where we espy Bernard Lowe randomly turning up at the port town of Rizal in Palawan. This season was filmed in the island city-state of Singapore, which is just a few hours' flight from the Philippines.

Next, you might wonder, will there ever be a real-life Westworld?

There already was.

It's easy to forget that "Westworld" is a Michael Crichton creation, his first theatrical movie as director. The 1973 film, on which the HBO series is based, inspired a theme park to open in Japan within that decade. 

Western Village, located 70 miles north of Tokyo, had all the looks of an American frontier town. Cyborg-looking husks of life-sized, plastic figures from the Wild West still lie scattered in the park, a former family ranch. It closed in 2006.

The now-abandoned Western Village in Japan (below via Jordy Meow) was built in the 1970s, following novelist Michael Crichton's debut as a movie director with 'Westworld,' adapted into an HBO show (above)

We have ChatGPT for now, but we're still years from walking among sentient robots. The closest we have to a Westworld citizen is Sophia, a social humanoid robot developed by a robotics company in Hong Kong. She even has her own passport. 

Hanson Robotics' Sophia (right via ITU Pictures) could be the first step towards a real-life Dolores Abernathy (played by Evan Rachel Wood on the hit HBO TV series)

To the west, in Waltham, Massachusetts, you will find Atlas, a bipedal robot. The Boston Dynamics creation might not share Sophia's flesh-like appearance but it can do everything from a simple stroll to backflips.

Which leads us to our next question: How close are we to having realistic sexbots?

For now, we have Harmony, being marketed by maker RealDoll as the world's first sex robot. Realbotix, RealDoll's parent company, has also debuted Harmony's counterpart, Henry, the world's first male sexbot. 

This is to say nothing of all the increasingly lifelike sex dolls now on the market.

It all ultimately begs the question: Could someone like M3GAN not be far off into the future?

We already got a taste of that with Microsoft's Bing chatbot, who has been spouting the most unhinged, zaniest things since its public debut.

Welcome to the future, fancy travelers.