Discover Top Posts Tagged with #replicants

Do you think that it is possible to produce constructs ethically? ART and the other AIs are being produced by PSUMNT in a system that is at least mostly ethical, what if the university was given a good reason to have constructs? I am just interested in the concept because I have read several fics involving Murderbot meeting baby AIs, but none with non-traumatized constructs and it would have so many emotions.

hi anon, I absolutely adore getting questions like this! please send more if you’d like :) I love thinking about these sorts of things. so:

is it possible to produce constructs ethically?

honestly? no. I think the minute you create a consciousness for a purpose is the minute you dip into unethical.

but everyone else in the TMBD universe has already done this. it’s sort of like nuclear weapons to my mind: once one person starts making conscious machines, everyone does, and if you want to heft some weight for the good, you’re going to have to play with the tools at hand

so you’re right that the closest to ethical you can get is ART and the PSUMNT AIs (though the true test of that is what the University would do if ART/other ship AIs wanted to retire. would that be permitted? and what would that look like?)

so, ethical constructs… the replicants from Blade Runner have been at the top of my mind recently. I think there’s a lot of meat to be gleaned by comparing the two. replicants are organic human-form androids. they’re not cybernetic. they are organic beings created for things like slave work in off-planet mines, for sexwork, as personal assistants, and to track rogue replicants down (to kill them). they have a flatter affect and emotional range than humans. this is partly due to them getting created as full adults. to even them out, cognitively and emotionally, replicants are given false memories of childhood. they also have genetically engineered expiration dates, so they only live a couple years.

the plot of the more recent one with Ryan Gosling, Blade Runner 2049, was that a replicant conceived a baby. so you have a replicant out there who wasn’t created as an adult, but born. with real memories. and the point is this born-replicant isn’t necessarily more special than the created-replicants, because they all deserve to have self-determination as conscious beings. otherwise, they’re slaves.

to bring this back to your question, in the Blade Runner universe, i think the only way to ethically create replicants, is for replicants to intentionally conceive and raise children. to start taking part in society with all the rights humans have.

so, back to the TMBD universe: constructs and high-level bots were created with a purpose. they are slaves to this purpose. and (as far as we know) constructs don’t have the organics to reproduce on their own (we’re going to ignore 2.0, this is already too long) so the only way to make new constructs is by manufacturing them

one way to do this ethically is by doing it how the first constructs were created: in either Exit Strategy or Rogue Protocol, MB watches part of a documentary on constructs, and it’s revealed they were originally made from people who were sick or dying and so volunteered to supply their genetic material. the constructs made from them (and i don’t believe they looked human at this point, but i’d need to find the passage to check for sure) got to choose their assignments and were often with people they were friends with before being constructs. i mean, at that point, a construct like this is more similar to an augmented human (a cyborg)

sooo, if any manufacturer goes back to that, that might be an ethical construct, as long as the person volunteering wasn’t coerced in some way. otherwise, you’re going to have to put ethics aside if you’re going to engineer a conscious being for a purpose

i do think there are more ethical ways for PSUMNT to get constructs on their side than manufacturing them, the most obvious being to liberate them. Preservation is already starting to do this. As far as I can tell, Preservation doesn’t even create MIs since they are legally considered people. this allows MIs to immigrate as refugees as long as they have a guardian.

there are some paternalistic issues with that of course, but that’s pretty damn ethical, all things considered. and there are factions within Preservation that explicitly want to change this (Mensah and Co)

I think that’s where the arc of the books is leading: a revolution of freed constructs.

#ask #anon #meta #constructs #PSUMNT #ART #TMBD #the murderbot diaries #blade runner #blade runner 2049 #replicants #exit strategy #rogue protocol

Echoes of an Ending

Their embrace is a sanctuary of shared mortality—a quiet defiance against a world that designed them to be tools, yet gifted them the burden of human emotion.