Honestly, I am on a very personal level, in agreement with how the events in Living Memory unfolded.
Those people were already dead, they relieve memories as stored Data in a Machine, their aspirations only exist based on past memories and they are *unable* to develop beyond what was coded.
Their hopes and dreams were the same hopes and dreams once they were alive, they could not make new ones, Sphene did, and she became an anomaly, which is why she had to erase her own memories to break the strings that held her back from achieving her primary function. It is all code and AI, and as the name stated for the place: It is a Living Memory.

There is no other solution. The ethical solution is to shut everything down, to let those people rest and move on, for they are to rejoin the Aetherial Sea and their souls will become someone new as they live again. That is THE BEST possible outcome for those people, what happened in that place was a massive tragedy akin to nature. Which is why Cachiua states that all things die. But those people there, are not alive. They have been dead for thousands of years. To allow the natural course of life to follow is only kindness to those.