alt Hacker NewsHas anyone played SOMA? Spoiler warning. It explores this idea of, what if there's an AI in charge of ensuring mankind survives at all costs. What would it be willing to do, to keep us alive? Would we even recognize the result as human?
It's a horror game and it explores all kinds of fascinating and disturbing scenarios. Simulations of human minds. Artificial worlds. Human minds in robot bodies. Genetically modified humans. Man-machine hybrids etc.
(A great exploration of the substance/structure matrix, by the way. My favorite question in AI and consciousness. Is the special sauce in the material, or its shape, both, or neither?)
The very question of aligning the AI with humans assumes that we have a very robust definition of what human means in the first place.
Ostensibly the AI was aligned. It did succeed in keeping humans alive! But it did that in all sorts of ways that mostly made them wish it hadn't.
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SOMA was a cognito-hazard for me and my roommate in college; we played it in the dark together while on some sort of mild hallucinogen and when it came time for Simon to find that high-pressure dive suit, we lost our minds (no pun intended). Watching the WAU twist its way through PATHOS II in whatever way worked first is a particularly jarring analogy for what has happened to our own profession. I can't help but think it would be nice for Frictional Games to revisit this topic again soon.
Sidenote: It breaks my heart that all the great underwater-settings in media are hotbeds of horror scenarios. I think Subnautica broke the mold for this, here's to hoping the next generation of aquanauts take to the depths from that series.
The same theme was present in season 2 of Raised By Wolves. (RIP my favorite show in some years)
One of my favorite games, and I recommend it to anyone who loves a good existential sci-fi horror. If you are not comfortable with stealth games, it also has a "Safe Mode" where enemies aren't a threat to you if you just want to experience the story.
Spoiler warning for those that havent played--
I forget the details exactly, but one scene stuck with me. It was a screen in one of the labs, where an experiment was running over and over. It was an uploaded consciousness of one of the test subjects, stuck in an interview room. He kept realizing he was trapped in a simulation and would start panicking. The computer would reboot him, trying another sequence to get him to not realize he was an AI. I think you as the player are given the option to turn him off forever, iirc.