To achieve the desired look, “Westworld,” like “Game of Thrones” before it, has been made into a globe-spanning enterprise. The show spent about a week shooting locations in Singapore to take advantage of the city’s modernist architecture. In Valencia, Spain, the planetarium of the City of Arts and Sciences provided the exterior for the San Francisco headquarters of Delos, the corporation that runs Westworld. The boardroom interior, built on a soundstage here, was designed to precisely match the contours of the Spanish building — pans of water were even placed beneath the “windows” to refract light upward like the pools that surround the original.

Apart from the occasional futuristic helicopter — the province then, as now, of the ultrarich — the technology on physical display is limited. Caleb, a construction worker, is occasionally accompanied by a clunky robot partner. But rather than serve up flying cars, the show offers merely remote-controlled motorcycles and driverless ride-shares. Nolan said the intention was to extrapolate about three decades into the future.

“If I look around, there’s shockingly little that has changed in the last 30 years,” he said. “The big change, of course, is that everybody’s carrying a cellphone around.” Likewise, the technology in the show’s imagined future has evolved inward more than outward.

At the smaller end of the spectrum, this entails advances such as RICO, a kind of crowdsourcing crime app that enables users to earn cash by serving as anonymous links in the chains of planned heists and kidnappings. At the larger end is Rehoboam, an enormous server named after a biblical king that uses its vast store of personal data to determine the life-paths of every human being. (Applying for a new job? Rehoboam will tell the prospective employer whether or not you are a proper fit.) This triumph of artificial intelligence represents another of the new season’s cunning inversions: In the park, machines had their futures mapped by human beings; in the wider world, human beings have their futures mapped by a machine.

Rehoboam is representative of a broader shift that “Westworld” makes in Season 3, from the allegorical to the more nearly literal. The hosts of the first two seasons, fitfully struggling toward consciousness between occupational assaults and killings, were always stand-ins in a parable about free will and enslavement. This time around, it’s the human beings — such as Caleb, an ex-soldier assigned to a dead-end job — who are trapped in loops not of their choosing. Little wonder that he finds himself drawn to Dolores’s plan to overthrow the system.