Thoughts on the Jeri - S.A.C. episode 3 (Android and I)
Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2013 6:49 pm
Hello there, first time here.
SPOILERS for the whole S.A.C. series ahead (also big wall of text, sorry =P).
Recently I've re-watched episode 3 of S.A.C., the one with the Jeri android mass "suicides", and wondered about the nature of the ambassador's son Marshall McLachlan's Jeri (let's call it "the Jeri").
The episode seems to hint at the possibility that the Jeri had developed a ghost of its own, due to the last sentence it spoke to Marshall at the end of the episode. Togusa learned, in fact, that the sentence ("I'm sorry. I really did love you.") was not in the same movie where the rest of the Jeri's dialogue was copied from. Also, the fact that the Jeri seemingly restrained Marshall against his will seems to further confirm the existence of a ghost.
Now, my views on this subject are divided. On one hand, I am somewhat skeptical about the possibility of a "conscience emerging from a sea of information", at least within the next few decades, which is when GITS happens anyway. On the other hand, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of appreciating the show (as I did on the subject of the Puppetmaster in non-S.A.C. universes), and so I concede the possibility that the Jeri simply "became human".
But to end the story here is no fun. It should be possible to find an explanation for the Jeri behavior that agrees with my skeptical side. Or maybe I'm just grasping at straws, I don't know.
Anyway, a theory of mine is that Marshall, being an expert programmer (given the fact that he developed the virus that affected the Jeri line, as well as the "security fix" for his own Jeri), decided to "teach" the Jeri some dialogues from an old movie he was fond of. The show already hints at this, but I think he went further and actually presented other movies to the Jeri, making her learn not only words, but actions as well.
In a desperate attempt to make his Jeri behave more humanly, he started to apply more complex algorithms in his programming, and eventually, as it is human nature, introduced a bug somewhere amidst the logic (hey, it's his fault for not making his program open-source! ). This bug then manifested itself at the end of the episode, thereby explaining the seemingly out of context sentence and the restraining from the Jeri.
You may then reply with:
- "But the restraining was not out of context, the Jeri certainly did it to save him from doing something stupid like getting shot while resisting arrest!"
or
- "That sentence was not out of context at all, the Jeri was actually saying that she/it loved him after all, despite what she/it had been forced to say from the movie dialogue!"
Okay, maybe instead of a bug, what Marshall created was actually an unintended feature. He may have created such a complex program that not even he could predict its behavior, and so the Jeri's restraining and extra dialogue were simply the result of it mixing other actions/words from different movies.
As a final possibility, one that I find harder to believe, is that perhaps he really did have a stroke of genius, and successfully created an human-like AI, just as Dr. Asuda did, the father of the Tachikoma. However, in Dr. Asuda's case, what he developed was a special kind of neurochip which was the foundation of the Tachikoma AIs, and so we're not just talking about software anymore (I would love to talk more about the matter of neurochips alone, since it's a subject I find fascinating, but maybe some other time, in another post).
Anyway, what are your thoughts on this?
SPOILERS for the whole S.A.C. series ahead (also big wall of text, sorry =P).
Recently I've re-watched episode 3 of S.A.C., the one with the Jeri android mass "suicides", and wondered about the nature of the ambassador's son Marshall McLachlan's Jeri (let's call it "the Jeri").
The episode seems to hint at the possibility that the Jeri had developed a ghost of its own, due to the last sentence it spoke to Marshall at the end of the episode. Togusa learned, in fact, that the sentence ("I'm sorry. I really did love you.") was not in the same movie where the rest of the Jeri's dialogue was copied from. Also, the fact that the Jeri seemingly restrained Marshall against his will seems to further confirm the existence of a ghost.
Now, my views on this subject are divided. On one hand, I am somewhat skeptical about the possibility of a "conscience emerging from a sea of information", at least within the next few decades, which is when GITS happens anyway. On the other hand, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of appreciating the show (as I did on the subject of the Puppetmaster in non-S.A.C. universes), and so I concede the possibility that the Jeri simply "became human".
But to end the story here is no fun. It should be possible to find an explanation for the Jeri behavior that agrees with my skeptical side. Or maybe I'm just grasping at straws, I don't know.
Anyway, a theory of mine is that Marshall, being an expert programmer (given the fact that he developed the virus that affected the Jeri line, as well as the "security fix" for his own Jeri), decided to "teach" the Jeri some dialogues from an old movie he was fond of. The show already hints at this, but I think he went further and actually presented other movies to the Jeri, making her learn not only words, but actions as well.
In a desperate attempt to make his Jeri behave more humanly, he started to apply more complex algorithms in his programming, and eventually, as it is human nature, introduced a bug somewhere amidst the logic (hey, it's his fault for not making his program open-source! ). This bug then manifested itself at the end of the episode, thereby explaining the seemingly out of context sentence and the restraining from the Jeri.
You may then reply with:
- "But the restraining was not out of context, the Jeri certainly did it to save him from doing something stupid like getting shot while resisting arrest!"
or
- "That sentence was not out of context at all, the Jeri was actually saying that she/it loved him after all, despite what she/it had been forced to say from the movie dialogue!"
Okay, maybe instead of a bug, what Marshall created was actually an unintended feature. He may have created such a complex program that not even he could predict its behavior, and so the Jeri's restraining and extra dialogue were simply the result of it mixing other actions/words from different movies.
As a final possibility, one that I find harder to believe, is that perhaps he really did have a stroke of genius, and successfully created an human-like AI, just as Dr. Asuda did, the father of the Tachikoma. However, in Dr. Asuda's case, what he developed was a special kind of neurochip which was the foundation of the Tachikoma AIs, and so we're not just talking about software anymore (I would love to talk more about the matter of neurochips alone, since it's a subject I find fascinating, but maybe some other time, in another post).
Anyway, what are your thoughts on this?