133 réponses à ce sujet

[aimlessgun]

AquamanOS wrote...

Here's a question. Did the team even know about indoctrination at all? Not everyone seems to. The Derelict Reaper guys seem to have no idea what's going on when their memories get messed up,

The Derelict reaper dudes bother me as well, actually. Indoctrination is probably not in the public awareness, but specialized teams dedicated to studying Reaper tech would sure as hell have gone over the experience with Sovereign with a fine tooth comb.

In any case, they havn't been specific enough about indoctrination to say for sure what they should have done. But Bioware should have realized people would question this point and maybe put in some visually obvious (but still inadequate) countermeasures. Like some bubble around the device at least!

It feels like they sacrificed believability for "looks cooler this way", which is par for the course in ME2. They don't seem to realize something realistic would have been way cooler, and people would have appreciated them taking the time to think it through.

[CulturalGeekGirl]

When faced with Ethical Science Decisions, I ask myself this simple question: WWMSD?

Ok. For me the best way to study reaper tech is to break it into pieces and study the pieces.

I'm willing to do a volunteer-based study on indoctrination using reaper chunks... not prisoners, must be TRUE volunteers. Heavily funded, give each participant a few million credits for their involvement, with the knowledge that they'd stay quaranteened until we are either sure all the Reapers are destroyed or we develop a sure-fire way to detect indoctrination. Even after Reaper's defeat, they may need to be quarantined... maybe some small colony world somewhere? We'll figure it out. Need to prove hypothesis about Reaper chunks, first and foremost - if they prove capable of indoctrination, must alter future studies drastically. Am willing to risk it, because the current hypothesis is that they are safe... far less risk for subjects. Even with this, I'm going further than I want to.

Working with larger-scale reaper tech may not be necessary, if smaller scale studies work out. But if I must, I must. With larger pieces of Reaper tech, start with proof-of-concept studies with rats and fruit flies. See if the behavior mods work on anything other than sentients. Then try octopi, pigs, monkeys, intelligent animals incapable of calculus. When does sentience begin? It seems like the collectors were barely sentient outside of their programming... could we "trick" indoctrination into working on modified non-sentient animals? Would a monkey with enhanced cybernetic implants have a similar sentience level to a collector? Tests.

Insist Cerberus and the Alliance military turn over all copies of logs from the derelict reaper, the Object Rho project, and any other encounter with Reaper tech. Perform analysis on pre-existing data before doing direct tests. Again, this may provide enough data to render human testing unnecessary.

Honestly though, at this point... with only a few months to a year before the Reapers actually arrive, I find it highly unlikely that any short-term study of indoctrination would benefit more than it would risk. Notice I say risk, rather than cost - any volunteers for the indoctrination study project aren't going to be trusted to fight when the time comes, and any scientists you send within a hundred thousand miles of that thing may be a loss. Resources are probably better spent somewhere else.

Also, I hope to GODS we've been freaking studying Ilos, or that someone has. I think we gain more by throwing resources into studying Ilos, seeing if we can figure out what tech they had to diagnose indoctrination, what notes they had on the reapers, all that would be more beneficial than a handful of ridiculous, irresponsible, badly designed human test subject studies of indoctrination.

I mean that holo was active TWO YEARS ago. Do they not have data recovery specialists in the future?

Modifié par CulturalGeekGirl, 05 avril 2011 - 04:07 .

[marshalleck]

aimlessgun wrote...

It feels like they sacrificed believability for "looks cooler this way", which is par for the course in ME2. They don't seem to realize something realistic would have been way cooler, and people would have appreciated them taking the time to think it through.

Not in Mac Walters's Mass Effect! This the same guy who has spent the time since ME2 release writing Mass Effect comic books. 

[CulturalGeekGirl]

I look forward to the part in ME3 where we kill some crazy dude who is doing medical experiments based on reaper-tech, then have to decide whether or not to keep or destroy his research.

Because... no matter what, that dude is getting shot in the face. We might save the research, but he is not getting out alive. That way, no blood on our hands.

Actually... that's kind of a good way to go about it. Bait some poor, unethical scientist into "illegally" carrying out experiments we don't have a stomach for, then murder him with a shotgun, keeping the data for ourselves. This way we do a favor to the universe by removing unethical people, we get our data, and the only people who we directly kill are fundamentally unethical people, who believe it is ok to kill people to advance science. Thus they logically should be fine with their own deaths.

This plan cannot fail.

[CulturalGeekGirl]

Saphra Deden wrote...

CulturalGeekGirl wrote...

Because... no matter what, that dude is getting shot in the face. We might save the research, but he is not getting out alive. That way, no blood on our hands.

Umm... honey? The blood is still on your hands in that case. You baited a guy into doing research for you and then killed him to cover it up. In fact one could say there is more blood your hands than on his!

There is no more blood on my hands than there is irony in my posts.

[MrFob]

Wouldn't the geth be perfectly suited to study reaper tech for us and find out about indoctrination? As AIs, they should be immune (it took code rewriting to create the heretics). We have a force of geth (judging by our interaction with legion) who are at least willing to work together with organics to fight the reaper threat. The next reaper artifact we put our hand on should be immediately tossed to the geth for study and the development of counter-indoctrination technology IMO. The quarians and the council races will go nuts when they learn about this but hey, the turian councilor is the perfect example of how sometimes you have to ****** people off for their own good.

[MrFob]

Why not? Legion works with you on behalf of the geth. You helped him with the heretics. The geht oppose the reapers but can't hope to stop them on their own after they indoctrinate all the organics and take over the galaxy. I'd say, they have more then enough motivation to help. and no real reason not to.

[Leonia]

Saphra Deden wrote...

The geth aren't inclined to do that so, yeah, but no.

Anything that isn't your idea isn't worthy of your attention, is it?

[MrFob]

Because geth are AIs, they are capable of learning and creative thinking.
I guess mechs might work, if you can remote control everything (it would take a lot of time and resources though). That makes me think the reapers must have some other defense mechanisms, other then indoctrination to prevent tampering with their stuff. If you can just use remote controlled drones, to figure out their technology, than it's not very well secured, is it?

Oh, one more thing, I think using the geth for this would make for a good story aspect. Shep has to get all the galaxy to work together to defeat the reapers and to that end, all the races have to overcome even their most established prejudices. THe whole In-organics vs organics issue is one of the most powerful conflicts in the ME galaxy at the moment. In ME1, I thought that would scale up to the whole reaper conflict but ME2 reshuffled the cards in that respect.

[Mr0TYuH]

In Mass Effect: Revelation, one of the main plot points was that Sovereign could influence AIs. In fact that was the whole reason Saren wanted to secure Sovereign for himself, so that he could use it to gain control of the geth. Of course, it turns out the geth were immune to Nazara's influence, and only the heretics chose to follow it. Shoot, now that I've thought of this, it's really going to bug me.

[Mr. Gogeta34]

Makes me wonder though, how could they say it doesn't affect them if there's heretics?

[CroGamer002]

Arcian wrote...

This principle.

lol

[Mr. Gogeta34]

I never talked about nanite-based indoctrination per-se. But while we're on the subject, they were being affected by the reapers through suggestion. Plus, seeing Nazara as a sort of messiah is definitely an indoctrination trait.

[Gentleman Moogle]

Saphra Deden wrote...

Mr. Gogeta34 wrote...

Makes me wonder though, how could they say it doesn't affect them if there's heretics?

When are you people going to learn? The Heretics were not indoctrinated. They made a decision. Geth can disagree, sometimes they can fail to achieve concensus. You saw this in Legion's loyalty mission when his programs couldn't decide what to do with the virus.

Saren did not want Sovereign because it could control geth or because it could control AI (which was never stated to be its power). He wanted it because what he learned about it told him it was extremely advanced and powerful.

And yet, there's an interesting paradox there. Prior to the Heretics, the Geth were one. There was no deviation, they were all of the same consensus. Then, suddenly, they had a different consensus. They turned against the other Geth to pursue something different. Even Legion made mention of the fact that the Geth were not behaving like "Geth" on his loyalty mission. 

So... What made the Heretics become heretics? What changed the consensus? And why did it only affect a small portion of the Geth?

Now, you mention that Legion could make no consensus, and this is true; but that just means he was unable to make a decision -- which is why he left it to Shepard. What happened to Legions higher run-times and what happened to the Heretics aren't really comparable. If the half of Legion's processes that disagreed with the other half started tearing Legion apart in order to get their way, THAT would be more like what happened to the Heretics. 

The Geth are one. The Geth had always been one. 

And suddenly, they weren't. 

Something happened to them. My guess? Indoctrination. We've no proof that Reapertech DOESN'T work on sentient A.I. processes. Hell, we don't even know how it works, period. It stands to reason that a being that is a cross between cybernetics and organic parts that can have a brainwashing effect on organics without them noticing would also have something that accomplishes the same deal with non-organic species. 

[Mr. Gogeta34]

Indoctrination's method can come through suggestion. It's when they start worshiping the Reapers that you can argue indoctrination. The Heretics kinda fit that thar.

But yeah so far (outside of a total rewrite) they couldn't seem to change their minds.

[CulturalGeekGirl]

Indeed. I think "were the Geth indoctrinated or not?" is a mystery, one that I hope ME3 will solve.

Because, as I've said before, we don't even know enough about how indoctrination works to design a study to figure out how it works.

My theory is this: indoctrination mostly affects your priorities... so it can be very subtle. Only when you're actually in a giant reaper thing do you get the obvious crazy-juice kind of indoctrination.

Legion says that the heretics believe 1 < 2, while the main Geth believe that 2 < 3. To me, that means they essentially disagreed on what was important, rather than what was correct - they solved entirely different equations. Deciding that something else is important isn't a math error. Instead, making choices is an emergent property of sentience - so in Legion's mind, causing someone to make a different choice, as long as that choice was math-based, would not be brainwashing.

To give an example: the Geth decide to calculate whether or not joining Sovereign is a good idea. There are two factors to consider: will joining up result in the Geth reaching their maximum potential, and will it result in them achieving their dream of a complete communal processing center more quickly? Now, main Geth decide that the first question is more important, while heretics decide the second is more important. Both do their calculations, and make decisions based on those calculations - the main Geth decide that helping Sovereign will hurt the future of their species, while the heretics decide that it will speed them towards their goal of species unity. Both are correct in their calculations, it is their choices that differ.

The same thing could possibly be said of Saren - he did the "math" and figured that organics have a better chance of surviving as servants than they do of beating the reapers. He may even be correct. But is survival more important than freedom? He solved a different equation, one that the Reapers lead him to believe was important.

TL;DR

I don't think the Geth concieve of brainwashing in the same way we do, so we can't neccesarily conclude that Legion is correct when he says the heretics weren't brainwashed by Sovereign... he is only correct when he says that Sovereign did not cause them to commit a math error.

[kaotician]

I thought the Geth were indoctrinated. That whole business Legion talks about regarding the runtime error, and the consequent incremental adjustments to Geth thinking that it introduced? The stuff that's subsequently alluded to in Overlord (Overload, surely?), where David picks up the same mathematical error, at the end?

Modifié par kaotician, 05 avril 2011 - 08:31 .