On technical thing about the Animatrix, that's bothered me for a while, is how needless wasteful they seem to be. To robot 'victims' it might seem added insult to injury, but it also just seems a bit silly. Wasting bullets and destroying valuable parts, instead of just shutting off machines and disassembling them. Even in a disposable culture that much refined metal (and probably plastics and other things), you wouldn't want to just bury or dump, you'd recycle it all or a very significant portion. You'd think they'd have pretty dumb automated factories for that, or even armies of poor people to do that, if they didn't entirely trust machines. Of course it doesn't seem quite like a mass grave without it appearing like dumping bodies, so there is some artistic license involved.

Surely they'd take voice commands and easily accessible controls and comprehensive systems of safety features, besides being autonomous and self directing. They must have historical sci-fi even in most speculative futures right? It would be really amusing to hear a show mention Star Trek or Star Wars like Buck Rogers or HG Wells. Asimovs robotic laws? This is where Westworld excels, you just wipe their memories, or even just their short term recall, kind of like RAM. You wouldn't want to have to reteach artificially retarded intelligences like drooling babies all over again.

Just with these two considerations in mind, it will be very interesting if next season what we learn, and if we see outside Westworld at all, what it will be like. Will it be like the Animatrix, Asimovs Trantor,, Stephensons Diamond Age, Cyberpunk or Shadowrun? Something between Bladerunner and Star Trek, with Shades of Total Recall, the Running man or Windup Girl? I don't think I'll mind, so long as it's not too recognizably one thing and they put some thought into it, so it's plausible and self consistent. Specific questions might be, what sort of computers do they have? Do hosts have wetware or hardware brains? Do hosts eat and breath and function in every way like humans, old vs new? What level of medical technologies and advances exist? What limits are there still? What problems have their societies solved, and what new challenges (gaming addiction and hikikomori must be so much worse!)? What historical events have happened? So many little things they could just add little details here and there. It's where having one arch auteur like GRRM with an overall vision really helps.