Omicrons and The Endless (Do Endless Dream of Electric Sheep?)

[Turtledeluxe]

The real question, the actual question is 'Were the Endless people?' And by every perceivable metric, yes, they were people, they had dreams, they had ambitions, they had regrets, they could deduce things, they could love, they could experience fear and pain. So yes, we deleted an entire race of people in between boat rides and ice cream and that was tacky.

Sorry but no. In order to qualify as a "race" (what a bizarre choice of word) you need to have a soul and be alive. I'm not sure how many video games you have to play to not understand this basic concept.

The Endless are instances of a person. This is why Sphene mourns Otis when he dies. You can argue that a digital projection that walks, talks and acts like a person is really them. But it's not them. And Endless themselves acknowledge this and interact with the living in this exact way.

This is like saying if I feed all of your text messages since 2020 to an AI and ask them to type up a message that sounds like you, I can just regard them as you because it sounds extremely accurate. The way you are thinking will undoubtedly lead to human rights violations in the future (if this kind of perception becomes common, how terrifying).

And I mean that. Not being able to distinguish a highly novel thing (of any kind) vs a human or an original version of a human and presuming things about them based on your feelings seems incredibly dangerous given where technology is going.

I mean in fact, as we know, this kind of thinking is already resulting in ethics violations in the artistic space.