Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[MikkoAkure]

The Sundered are not a natural creation. They are the mutilated bits of another species. Given your view here, I have to wonder if you agree with Emet-Selch about the rejoinings. After all, Ancients are the natural evolution of humanity in the FF14 universe.

The Sundered at least are still alive.

The Endless are a bunch of collected dead people. They had lives, they died, and instead of being reincarnated they're removed from the natural cycle and uploaded to a cloud server that randomly decides when to manifest them into a dilapidated purgatory until the end of time (or the terminals) by stitching their memories onto someone else's soul.

Again, if the Endless were collected while they were actually alive and the state of being Endless was a natural continued state of life and done to evade some sort of calamity, I'd feel a little different about the whole thing. Or if like the Sundering, it had been done widespread against an entire people but they still managed to continue actual mundane living after that. But it's not any of that. Their memory aether is collected postmortem. These people are ghosts. They're not a "new version of life", they HAD lives.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

The Sundered at least are still alive.

The Endless are a bunch of collected dead people. They had lives, they died, and instead of being reincarnated they're removed from the natural cycle and uploaded to a cloud server that randomly decides when to manifest them into a dilapidated purgatory until the end of time (or the terminals) by stitching their memories onto someone else's soul.

Again, if the Endless were collected while they were actually alive and the state of being Endless was a natural continued state of life and done to evade some sort of calamity, I'd feel a little different about the whole thing. Or if like the Sundering, it had been done widespread against an entire people but they still managed to continue actual mundane living after that. But it's not any of that. Their memory aether is collected postmortem. These people are ghosts. They're not a "new version of life", they HAD lives.

I also do not believe we have the right to wipe out the spirits in the aetherial sea, do you? I agree they are not alive, but I don't think being dead erases personhood and then gives me the right to do with the dead whatever I want. Alive or dead, they were sentient beings whose existence we were ending. I don't really have a "you had your chance" policy when it comes to wiping out societies.

[MikkoAkure]

I also do not believe we have the right to wipe out the spirits in the aetherial sea, do you? I agree they are not alive, but I don't think being dead erases personhood and then gives me the right to do with the dead whatever I want. Alive or dead, they were sentient beings whose existence we were ending. I don't really have a "you had your chance" policy when it comes to wiping out societies.

We have a right to delete the Endless because that was part of stopping Sphene who planned to kill everyone on the Source and eventually all the Reflections in order to power them. If she had her way, eventually the only people left would be Endless and then they'd slowly run out of souls to use and we'd be back to where we were before. The fact that they're dead and already lived just makes it "easier" to let us end this farce and allow them to peacefully pass on.

The people we fight in the Aitascope if that's what you're referring to are already fragmented souls who have partially merged with the Aetherial Sea itself. The deceased antagonists there are only able to maintain any sort of sense of self because they're angry and want to kill us. Defeating angry fragments of souls in the Lifestream if anything only speeds up the natural process of fully returning to it and ALL people who return to the Aetherial Sea are supposed to have their personhoods erased. That's literally the entire point.

[Turtledeluxe]

I also do not believe we have the right to wipe out the spirits in the aetherial sea, do you? I agree they are not alive, but I don't think being dead erases personhood and then gives me the right to do with the dead whatever I want. Alive or dead, they were sentient beings whose existence we were ending. I don't really have a "you had your chance" policy when it comes to wiping out societies.

You can frame it as wiping out a society all you want. That's not what the intention was. The games gonna go on, telling the same story, and your outrage isn't going to change it.

Thank goodness no one in real life judges things this way with such blatant disregard for context.

And yes, I'd wipe out spirits any time and any place if the only way to sustain those spirits is soul aether. Period end of story. There is no alternative fuel source. Humans in XIV are composed of memory and soul aether. That's the whole point. there is no alternative.

Also regarding the Sundering, the writers clearly tell you that meaningful change cannot occur as a result of the Elpis visit. And no the raids don't disprove this, because they hadn't happened yet in the story. Elidibus clearly spells out that nothing can disrupt the timeline we are already on. The writers may make mistakes and maybe even ignore their own time travel rules, but it's commonly understood we were never going to change anything regarding Meteion no matter who or what tried.

[Dorito_Burrito]

Read the terminals in Origenics and tell me that what Alexandria is doing is really okay.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Read the terminals in Origenics and tell me that what Alexandria is doing is really okay.

It depends on which thing you mean. Recreating the process of the aetherial sea? That's fine. That doesn't actually hurt anyone or anything. What these people want to do with their own souls in the privacy of their own silo is none of my business. Some people think that they are draining resources from the star like FF7, but there is no indication of that, looks like they are only delaying the return of souls to the aetherial sea with the regulator system, not preventing them.

Attempting to cheat death? Regardless of what the game says about it, I think it's perfectly fine to search for ways to avoid dying. The cycle of life and death is treated as sacred by the game (unless the WoL dies, then we invent time travel) but it's not really sacred, it's just the way things work ever since Venat shattered the planet. If someone subs you to 100 year lifespan against your will and you're not cool with 100 year lifespan, I believe you should be able to unsub because I value freedom of choice.

Experimenting on prisoners? Definitely bad. They shouldn't have done that.

Setting up a system that requires an ever increasing number of people to die to maintain? Both stupid and bad. We could have connected them with at least three different races who'd figured out less stupid ways to be immortal, but that's not even necessary because they figured out how to put souls in memories into mechanical bodies before they figured out how to make Endless, so they moved from a method that gave people mobility and didn't destroy all life in the universe to a method that left them stuck in one location and would eventually destroy all life in the universe. They could have slapped some regulators on the service bots and they would have been good to go, no genocides necessary...

Murdering people for their lifeforce? That's bad. You shouldn't do that.

Deleting memories of the dead? More a bad idea than an immoral one given the regulator system is opt-in, people willingly signed up for it, so once again falls under not really my business.

Wiping out an entire population because you deem them unnatural and subhuman? Evil. Definitely evil. Oh wait...that was us.

[Themarvin]

Living Memory is AI that has gone bad, it depicts the real world and how it could become...

[Hyperia]

I have a feeling that this topic is good enough to merit its own ethics class: Ethics 407 - AI Entities

[Carolingian]

We have a right to delete the Endless because that was part of stopping Sphene who planned to kill everyone on the Source and eventually all the Reflections in order to power them. If she had her way, eventually the only people left would be Endless and then they'd slowly run out of souls to use and we'd be back to where we were before.

No, this is simply evil. We were at war with Sphene, not with the Endless. Attacking civilian targets is always a war crime. It's really not something anyone has a right to. Yet it's the main strategy that the Scions settle on immediately. As soon as they enter Living Memory they don't even try to target Sphene, they instead target the innocent civilians. And only after they've killed those do they go for Sphene herself. It's honestly pretty crazy.

I have a feeling that this topic is good enough to merit its own ethics class: Ethics 407 - AI Entities

The philosophical and ethical debates and questions around AI Entities are genuinely interesting. It's why they're such a popular topic in science-fiction. It's what makes it so frustrating and disappointing that DT doesn't seem at all interested in exploring that topic beyond the most shallow and surface-level "they don't have souls so it's fine to erase them" without any real further discussion.

[Jojoya]

It is scary how many posters in this thread have become so consumed with living in a virtual world that they will choose preserving artificial recreations over genuine living beings.

Nothing sentient was killed when the terminals in Living Memory were shut down. You can go back to Living Memory after completing the MSQ and everything that was sentient is still there. Flora and fauna can be seen over the zone.

What was removed were facades and facsimiles created to cling to the dead past. Computerized recreations of people who are long dead are not sentient or living no matter how much they mimic such qualities.

Living Memory smells badly of Ascian Plan B. If they weren't able to force the aether sustaining new life into replacing the aether of their dead still contained within Zodiark so the dead could be revived, then they would consume that aether to power recreations of their friends and loved ones based on memory. Only the Ascian would have been demented enough to design the system to require aether from living beings as a power source when there were so many other options that could have been explored and used such as electrope.

Regardless of personal feelings, regardless of whether an individual's actions were right or wrong, the universe wants to move on. Attempting to cling to the dead that are part of the past is dangerous, especially if sustaining those dead means destroying the future.