^^^ I actually agree that delete =/= murder for most bots, i think I thought that at one point myself but for some reason forgot about it when I wrote this post?? i do think that's important.
when trying to figure out how much of a "person" any given bot is, i'm not as concerned (right now) with messy stuff like the specifics of legal rights on a place like preservation. I mean, I am also interested in that, i just don't expect to get a lot of in-depth details on it from MBs narration. That stuff is just background info in the kind of plots the books focus on.
I just don't know how to feel when a bot/system/whatever has to be destroyed during a mission.
calling out ART specifically was more of a joke in my original post, i'm concerned about this with every character, and MB especially. not because I need any of them to be morally pure or w/e, rather…this is important to most of the character analysis i try to do, I need to know what the hell they just DID, yknow???
cause i'm just going to keep thinking "I need to know if that bot you killed was a person. if it WAS a person, that means something narratively, and how you handled killing it (whether you tried to find another way to stop it before resorting to lethal, whether you are sorry you have to do it, whether a bot even registers as someone you should think about saving/sparing in the same way humans are) says something about you and where you are at in your character development."
I wouldn't be surprised if the author wanted to keep this space of plausible deniability depending on what is most convenient for the current plot point. Just assume that combatbot was not sentient because the climax needs it to blow up. But then when a random system like AdaCol2 has an opportunity to help, it might reveal itself to be way more conscious and intentional than MB initially thought.
Sometimes that is frustrating for me (specifically because we have a protag with a history of internalized hang-ups about constructs and other MI's, which makes me concerned about the calls it makes in combat) but there's pros and cons to it. I do like that any given bot/system/whatever could be varying degrees of sapient, even deceptively simple ones. it makes the whole world feel alive in a unique way. Like, look at all the different ways something can still be a 'person' without looking or sounding like a human at all.
If Wells ever decided she wanted to set down hard lines like "x bot is undoubtably a person and deserves full person rights/consideration (very rare), y bot is sentient but not self aware enough to be on par with a person (maybe more like an animal), and z bot is not sentient at all so you don't even have to blink when MB angrily blows it up you can just cheer" well, ig that could protect us from exhausting moral dilemmas getting in the way of the fun action scenes, but. idk. i think that would require definitively confirming that the vast majority of bots/systems aren't capable of ~real~ sapient interaction. I don't know if I'd like the world more for that, just for the sake of playing it morally safe in certain situations. i guess i dont know what i want.
however, it does add something to keep in mind if we accept the premise that the way (some) bots consider themselves "alive" isn't necessarily tied to a physical body/software location. Maybe a combatbot can be physically destroyed but its fine because they have backups elsewhere. thus they aren't dead until their last backup is destroyed, every version is equally "them"
(I dont think every bot can do this. constructs certainly can't, that's why I dont think 2.0 was the same thing as an ART-drone iteration. Miki's death also was presented as a definitive "death" so...idk what to make of that. We've never met another bot like Miki so idk how "normal" Miki was.)
anyway i have no conclusion just more questions and two side posts of rambles in my drafts that got (more) off track again lmao
yousharknotpass
snowghoul
titsay
baratheonpilled
jbbartram-illu
