Did the WAU really do anything wrong?

Your own consciousness would trick itself into thinking your human, so I would just jack off my imaginary dick using my stubby robot hands and imitate peak orgasm
See, I've got all this figured out

Depends on if you put any hope in the ARK. WAU pulled the strings that got it rolling. Personally I think ARK is a potential nightmare in itself.

i should've been able to destroy the ark.

What was the point of sending super advanced world simulator into space?

>Let WAU live
>Decades of experimentation, uncounted tortured consciousnesses
>Possibility of creating something worthwhile eventually
>Robo-people repopulate the earth

>Destroy WAU
>Humankind is dead 100%

Is this even a choice? It's like not approaching a girl you like just because you think your chances are very slim.

was ever stated what kinda propulsion the ark uses, if its like any of our satelites it will never even leave our system to be rescued by any other civilization or to get anywhere really.

What's the point of living?

It's not living

Nothing in this shit game made any sense. For starters, why was some random brain scan uploaded to some random robot?

Because if it were left on Earth, it would slowly lose power due to lack of sun and it would also eventually degrade because it's not preserved by the vacuum of space.

>why was some random brain scan uploaded to some random robot

Attached: 1510505075631.png (778x778, 325K)

How is living in a perfect world fully under your control is not living? How is you living on Earth practially different from you living on perfect computer Earth? You will likely not be able to influence anything outside your private life, not even mentioning the planet or solar system in either case.

>random
play the game
>random robot
WAU did it

Something something something solar power

Have you played the game? Simon's brain scan was the first known successful scan, which was then used as a benchmark file that came with every relevant software suite for free. Like the teapot in 3ds max. It was uploaded into a robot because WAU is tasked with preserving humanity.

Does it have to be picked up? It's not an escape pod, it's just an artificial world for it's inhabitants. It could be inside OP's ass since he's a massive faggot and the people of the ark wouldn't known or care.

Okay, what's the point of preserving it at all?

Are the sims in Sims-games alive?

>What's the point of preserving a part of humanity after everything else is gone?

The WAU and all it entails is the weakest part of the time, something even Joseph Anderson admits. It should've been reworked into a different concept, since now everytime I think of the game I think "why can't I join the Wau in trying to restore humanity", since he literally is the last beacon of hope for humankind. The whole ARK is pure, unadulterated escapism, basically what would happen if a NEET were to develop a post-apocalyptic survival strategy - just hide within a shell of one's own delusions.

Good question. Go on.

So aliens can find it and start playing the hardcore version of The Sims.

What's the point of doing anything if you'll die eventually?

Each robot in Soma is a conscious entity, as proven by you playing the game from Simon's perspective.

But they put it as if it was the last hope for humanity so I expected it to be rescued by something or someone, that thing floating in space with no purpose or destination is fucking pointless.

Probably sling outside the system like Voyager

That is if they find a way to access the damn thing without breaking it. This is putting a lot of faith into assuming whoever finds it knows how to operate it.

Wouldn't want that. Solar panels would lose power faster than if you'd left it in solar orbit and let it fall on the sun in a few billions of years.

Literally nobody is going to find a PC-sized object in space.

Why did simon freak out about not literally being transported to the ark?
Surely he knew deep down how it worked and surely he knew his robo body would deactivate and get crushed soon anyway. It's not like he has to worry

Because he's a moron that doesn't understand the concept of non-intrusive scanning VS literally taking out your brain and putting it in a different place.

>It's like not approaching a girl you like just because you think your chances are very slim.
Yeah... n-no one would ever be that stupid.

Attached: 1503317704950.png (646x595, 280K)

From what we see when Simon is connected to the WAU, everyone hooked into it is mentally in some type of Matrix type dream. Essentially what they wanted to do with the satellite, except the originals still exist and might be restored some day when WAU figures out the details.

Instead of staying in the bottom of the ocean, why didn't they swim up to the surface and re-colonize the world as cyborgs and robots? I found it weird how everyone assumed the world is over without even trying to salvage it.

> just hide within a shell of one's own delusions.

It's also what's likely going to happen IRL. We are limited by our biology. Artificial intelligence is way more flexible and can improve millions of times faster than we can. Unfortunately, our future isn't exploring space as crew members on space ships, or anything like that. Instead of expanding outwards we will develop inwards.

Just think about it. At low enough temperatures and with the right hardware, it would be possible to run entire simulated civilisations for billions of years on less power than a lightbulb requires. We would be immortal. If you hook someone up to the "Infinite pleasure and satisfaction" simulation that also makes them live forever and greatly expands their mental capabilities, even for a second, they will never want to come back to reality. Anything else will just make them feel like they're suffering and retarded in comparison.

Eventually all matter in the universe will distribute itself evenly across all of space, all temperature will be equal everywhere, and nothing new will ever happen again, forever. Nobody and nothing will remember your shame. Go ask her out.

>Instead of staying in the bottom of the ocean, why didn't they swim up to the surface and re-colonize the world as cyborgs and robots?
because literally everything was on fire

>except the originals still exist
Yeah, as abominations in various states of body horror. Though the fact that there was a single successful reanimation shows proof that WAU could've eventually done it right

It was totally and completely Uninhabitable.

According to whom? Surely there is life left in the self-sufficient bunkers.

The girl doesn't doom you to an eternity of psychotic cyborg undeath if things don't go well.

Pros for killing it:
- put an end to its hellish experiments

Neutral/questionable effects
- its experiments might one day find a way to revive humanity in a non-hellish way
- letting it continue to exist might mean dooming it to spend eternity on a dying planet, alone. killing it might be merciful

Cons of killing it
- you're essentially killing a conscious intelligence that truly thought it was helping mankind out

And how long do you think the people inside those will last?
The entire earth is inhospitable, humans can't live outside.

It's a rather simple AI construct just doing what it was programmed to do. Its algorithms just weren't made to account for the literal end of the world. Any discussion of whether it was right or wrong is assuming it had any moral agency to begin with. The fault really lies with its creators for its questionable design.

Why did simon feel bad about killing that drone with a cattle prod?

>self-sufficient bunkers
Unless those bunkers were built to withstand the force of enough nuclear missiles to glass the surface, i doubt it. By the time the game takes place, there hasn't been a single contact with the surface, only other underwater facilities

"Simon" visited all still existing ones

It's a human thi-

Hmm.

cause simon's a little bitch

WAU is as conscious as your roomba, though. It's just an algorithm that's following it's objective.

There are hundreds of heavy-duty government bunkers on the surface.

Things don't stay on fire forever. Sources in game say it was inhabitable, but there was no proof of it. And even in the worst case scenario if it was uninhabitable for life, it doesn't mean it was uninhabitable for robots. The point is that nobody even tried and just went along with a defeatist escapist fantasy.

>the earth is on fire
They could’ve put those fires out with seawater. The writing of this game was so fucking dumb.

Why does literally every thing that's still sort of "alive" in this game try to kill you?

The world's worst vanity project.
Caused dozens of suicides, and likely led to the facility being poorly maintained.

All for a satellite that will likely just plummet back into the Earth's atmosphere within a year.

But hey, those simulations that think they're people will experience who knows how many simulated years. You know... barring bugs that cause everyone to experience excruciating simulated pain 24/7.

Or a micrometeor slams into the HDD.

Or any of a billion extremely probable things happens to destroy this thing for which the last of humanity killed any possible future for itself for.

I think they wanted to eat your structure gel. I don't know why they couldn't scoop it off the walls though. Guess it's tastier once it's inside Simon.

If I remember correctly it was just supposed to sit in some stable orbit in our solar system for thousands of years since that was supposed to be the safest place they could think of where it could stay powered.

And he was being lied to so that he'd launch the world's worst and final vanity project.

I imagine the best way to go about this was if the citizens or at least developers of the ark had knowledge that they were inside the ark with a lot of external machinery for repairs and other stuff.
That would actually make them a thriving digital civilization in space.

>WAU is as conscious as your roomba, though. It's just an algorithm that's following it's objective.
I'm not convinced that's the case. The core question behind the game is "what is consciousness?". Simon is just a digitized consciousness uploaded into a robot, and yet that's enough for some people to consider him alive and conscious. We are never told the extent of WAU's intelligence or consciousness, but I'm assuming if mankind put all their hope behind it, then it's a little more complex than a Roomba. It's very likely that it's a true AI of sorts.

The main problem I had with the game is that my mindset was completely different from that of Simon and the other characters. They were all self-centered asshole, who as soon they realized were "dead" as humans just gave up and assumed there's no purpose in anything. In comparison I thought the set up was neat and hopeful, as Simon's existence proved you can create friendly biomechanical cyborgs. In the section where he made a new body, I would have just made another Simon to be a friend and ally. In fact I would made as many of them as possible, eventually wielding an army of Simons. With that kind of manpower you could clear out all the crazy robots from the seabases and make them livable again. Once I secured all the underwater bases, I would have planned expeditions to the surface to asses the damage and plan future colonization efforts. I would do experiments with the WAU goo to see how we could further enhance our reproductive capacities, as hopefully we would be able to fill the entire surface with millions upon millions of Simon. With that we'd begin a new age and a new dawn of humanity, populated entirely by Simon.

but what about solar or stellar radiation? over time it would destroy the satellite, even if they have super advanced radiation shielding a hundred years from now

He was literally brain damaged

Judging from the things it's creating, it's either a consciousness completely alien to our kind of thinking (as in, not created in the image of a human brain) or, which is much more possible, a very advanced version of one of those neural net things that create human faces that don't exist, but in this case it's whole humans. It's supposed to do shitty job while training itself, but eventually it will reach good results.

Seriously, the stupidity of this whole project really ruins SOMA for me. The story is so well paced and intriguing but the fact that they just jumped straight to this ark as their last resort and you never get a chance to say "hold up this shit's retarded, all hope isn't completely lost yet" means the story pretty much faceplants into the ground when you get to the final act and realize the narrative isn't going as deep into its themes as you were hoping. It's also not very believable that none of the crew members thought this way either, which makes the whole story seem like a poorly thought out hackjob. I dunno, I was just so into it for the most of the game and was so disappointed after reaching the end. How could they have aimed so low with such a lofty premise?

Attached: 1497175139205.jpg (243x207, 6K)

Part of Simon's character is that he's a fucking idiot. He's totally average intellectually.

>"why can't I join the Wau in trying to restore humanity"
Because of the freak ass zombie monsters it has no control over trying to kill the fuck out of you
You can decide not to kill it if you think it's doing the right thing but there's not really much else you can do about or for it

PUSSY PORTAL DOORS

It ended up that way because the game was remade halfway through. Look at the earliest footage of soma, the plot is completely, COMPLETELY different.

>Dude H.R. Giger lmao
Fucking hacks

>Giger holds a monopoly on biomechanical design
Come on man

To me it seemed like a general AI made with a poorly thought out objective function making it do unexpected things.

Like this hypothetical idea of telling an AI to get as many paper clips as it can, only to see it working to turn literally everything in the universe into paper clips, including humans.

I thought that was made specifically for the teaser (which is not unheard of, look at Half-Life 2's E3 presentation. Valve spent precious months on developing fake maps to impress people)
youtube.com/watch?v=RWVlumL4WCE

If not, what was the original plot?

How did the people suffer again? By having robot dementia? If that’s the case, then no

None, but what other hope did the protagonists have?
If they didn’t cling on to that ideal, they’d just give up

That's my point. I'm not saying it's not intelligent, I'm saying that it's not conscious. Read Blindsight by Peter Watts if you the idea of hyper-intelligent non-conscious intelligence excites you. It features an alien race that discovers Earth's radio and tv broadcasts, doesn't find any meaning behind the information and assume that we're trying to just spam them with shit as a sign of aggression.

Its not the same case, the monsters were just failed experiments in an attempt to make a functional human.
Simon is when she succeeded.

No, like the whole sexual overtones with the WAU and all the other biomechanical things you stick your hand into looking like anuses
But I was just being reductionist for the sake of shitposting. I think the designs are fine

youtu.be/lLVOif6CHgE
>Friendly reminder that the WAU created the technology for the ark, it was just reengineered to shitty island by the ark team.
>Friendly reminder Catherine's "important" mission is only feasible because of an early part of what the WAU is capable of.
>Friendly reminder that everyone hooked up to the WAU in-game were in their own personal world where they are at their happiest while under the protection of the AI and not the whims of space.
The WAU seemingly had effective parameters for knowing what makes humans happy, judging by everyone in the dream state. It would have done wonders if given enough time, in game it's only been a handful of years since the WAU went into Overdrive.

And the result will still be the same regardless.

You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for?

Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial.

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other.

But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you.

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.

Yeah but they get to feel a little better about it maybe

It was just supposed to orbit earth and take energy from the sun

Did it do anything wrong? Yes, plenty.
Was it malicious? Not necessarily.

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.

Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way.

And it's fighting back.

"They" who? The simulations?

That's what an efficient AI would be put in simple terms. Algorithms that try to adapt to any situation on their own. Self-aware AIs is a pointless idea and I don't think it's even being research at the time because scientists know this. If we programmed self-awareness (or taught the AI to gain it overtime) it would mostly likely be based in human consciousness, because that's our only understanding of how consciousness can work, so we would basically sabotage our own AI, deliberately telling it to not work efficiently, to doubt every decision.

To put an example, I imagine the event of you turning on a self-aware AI for the first time, as you pressing the button, and within a tiny fraction of a millisecond, the AI has run billions of parallel processes thinking on its own existence and purpose, has a complete indentity crisis is depressed and commits suicide. All of this before we even have the time to blink, it would seem like it didn't even turn on. It's what stories like IHNMAIMS and System Shock get right about AIs, they would either turn suicidal or complete psychopaths precisely because they're based on us.

If the WAU was so unquestionably efficient at its job to the very end, I think it's precisely the proof that it wasn't self-aware at all, or of course, not in any self-awareness that we can identify, but I doubt it's the case.

Attached: 1439492210185.jpg (238x251, 9K)

because it was the only fragment left of humanity. it was something, the point was that humanity kept fighting no matter how small the goal, and no matter how faint the hope

I liked how Simon progressed from just gently tapping them with his finger to full on deep fisting them

No? It's clearly an algorithmic process where its directive was never tested in complete extinction scenarios.

>girl asks what those things are
>"Those? I stick my fist in there."
>"What? Why?"
>"I dunno. It makes me feel good."

That convo was amazing.

>I need it, okay? I wouldn't have gotten this far without it
lol

>It's clearly an algorithmic process
Clearly? No. It's not explicitly stated anywhere that it's just an algorithm. Again, I'll point to the game's central theme: What is Consciousness? What does it mean to be alive? The game wants you to ask yourself if WAU is "alive", the same way it asks you if robo-Simon is alive.

it did nothing objectively wrong. it was only carrying out its sole purpose

no

that looks like a giant anus haha

Attached: feer.png (1100x800, 313K)

>Self-aware AIs is a pointless idea and I don't think it's even being research at the time because scientists know this

Pretty sure there are plenty of researchers in AI that would love to make a "conscious" or "self-aware" AI. The bigger problem that nobody has even the slightest clue what that even is or how to make it.

what game?

Simon's Quest

I don't remember Dracula looking that that

It's his secret final form

>it can't be conscious because it's made of silicon
Then what makes you conscious? You are, after all, just a big pile of if-then statements and optimization algorithms, you're just made of meat and not circuits.

WAU a cute
WAU a good kid

Soma, by the guys who made Amnesia
It would have been better as a walking simulator tbqhwy

Where's the body horror in this thread?

Let's get this shit out of the way.
>aliens

What

He knew. He just didn't want to accept it. His inability to accept the reality of the situation was the only thing that kept him from losing hope completely. His spergout at the end was simply his mental breakdown when he finally came to terms with how fucked everything was.

Attached: no-matter-how-fast-i-run-i-cannot-run-away-from-the-pain-kxwhd.jpg (640x793, 25K)

What aliens

The ones that caused the whole infection thing with the wau.

I'll repeat myself. What

U wot m8

>I'll point to the game's central theme
Idk for me, i couldn't get the actual title of the game out of my head and connected that to what the devs were thinking about: Body
Like, you'd probably ask any bumblefuck "What makes you, you?" or something similar and 90% the answer will amount to "my psyche"
And then this whole game puts that "psyche" into an unlikely body and shows how disfigured it becomes, how it completely breaks. Or, rarely, doesn't, like in the case of Cath
That's not entire point of course, but one of them

You played the game right?

I hope someone has the images,, because I don't but basically you missed a fantastic thread.

I smell bullcorn buddy

Very well user. But what happens when the program becomes corrupted and all the fetishes you hate become the forefront of your porn?

>fuck up your core objective so badly that the people who made you to help them want nothing more than to destroy you
???