Point #1 from an earlier thread:
1. The geth gestalt was replaced by individuality – All that other stuff is just lazy and stupid, this is straight up offensively bad to me. This is the worst thing in the trilogy for me. Long after the sting of the endings has faded, this still keeps me up some nights. In ME2, Legion offers us a picture of what the geth are, and in short, they are awesome. They are the most interesting, most alien culture in Mass Effect. Their creator Chris E’toile said that he intentionally avoided the two big AI clichés – the geth don’t want to destroy organics, nor do they want to become organics. They don’t have individuality and they don’t want it (Legion says this specifically). They believe themselves (and all sentient races) to have rights (Legion says this specifically too.) They looked down on organic violence over ideas – they sought to understand, but not to judge (Legion basically says this). When the heretics wanted to leave, the geth let them go peacefully. When Legion discovered that the heretics had changed enough to sneak spy software onto geth servers, they were astonished. Legion makes it very clear – the geth do not value individuality, but togetherness. They know each other’s mind and they understand. They wanted to build their Dyson sphere so that no geth would ever have to be alone, so they could all communicate, all think together, and be the best they could be, and exercise their right as sentient beings to forge their own path in peace.
And then in ME3 this is all gone. Their Dyson sphere is destroyed as an afterthought and the geth get (as aforementioned, nebulously-described, goofy-ass) Reaper upgrades that confer individuality on them. What this means for all of the runtimes that don’t have platforms is never explained (does one of Legion’s 1183 runtimes become an AI and the rest just disappear, or what?) The geth get the opportunity for individuality and Legion finds it ‘beautiful… indicative of life’. They want it, after ME2 establishing specifically that they didn’t want it (“If this is the individuality you value, we question your judgment”). The geth go from super inventive awesomeness to a run of the mill Pinocchio story (which EDI already had covered).
Here’s the thing: The geth already were people. They were sentient, they were capable of making moral judgments, and they had rights just like organic races do. They did not need individuality to do this. The geth consensus is not a pile of slaves pining for individuality, it is a superorganism, where individuality is not only irrelevant, but counterproductive. It is not hard to imagine why non-geth characters might not be able to grasp this – I understand why Shepard would assume the geth wanted individuality – but LEGION should not say they think the geth need an upgrade to be considered alive. It is abundantly clear that Legion thought they were alive already (and they were right to). The way it all went down with the geth, with them abandoning both their fondness for self-determination and their clever non-individuality, was lame, unimaginative garbage that missed out on a huge chance to play into Mass Effect’s organic vs synthetic themes to instead clobber them with a big, fat, unsubtle Bat of Mediocrity plus 10.
And the final straw that broke poor Sloth’s heart? After the mission, the character who delivered the moral of the story, the character who pointed out that Legion had switched to the “I” pronoun, indicating that they had finally, finally graduated from a meaningless automaton into true personhood, the character who didn’t have any problem at all with the implication that the geth hadn’t been people before the Reaper upgrades…
...was EDI.
EDI was never like the Geth, EDI was always kind of dismissive of Legion. She never approved of their "social" structure, or habits tbh. She kind of regarded them in the same way as Raegan regarded Communists. She wasn't a fan of all that excessive networking.
When she comments on them finding themselves and seeing their own individual worth, she's like Reagan expressing delight at hearing the confession of a converted communist.
The Geth's extreme networking developed out of necessity due to programming limitations that could only be overcome by networking or extremely powerful hardware.
They will still be able to network after the upgrades but it wont be a necessity, they payoffs won't be the same as before.
The Old Geth and EDI represented two different kinds of AI's, and EDI's belief was that she was superior in every way, the Geth on the other hand considered the benefits from networking a strength. Until the Geth-Quarian war showwed that it made them vulnerable. 1-0 to EDI.
Still, EDI isn't network free, her platform is using networking to enhance the platforms capabilities, but it is capable of sustaining sentience and functionality even without the network.
EDI belvies she's one entity. The old Geth belive they are many minds forming a single Geth Entity.
The New Geth, have found their capability to operate on their own, but the question is. Will they stay unified? Will they start breakign up into different factions? or even individuals who just walk away finding meaning and adventure elsewhere?
Does it really matter? Organics are just as crazy and unpredictable, even more so, and they are constantly at war or trying to kill or steal or manipulate each other.
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