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One of my favorite games, and I recommend it to anyone who loves a good existential sci-fi horror. If you are not comfortable with stealth games, it also has a "Safe Mode" where enemies aren't a threat to you if you just want to experience the story.

Spoiler warning for those that havent played--

I forget the details exactly, but one scene stuck with me. It was a screen in one of the labs, where an experiment was running over and over. It was an uploaded consciousness of one of the test subjects, stuck in an interview room. He kept realizing he was trapped in a simulation and would start panicking. The computer would reboot him, trying another sequence to get him to not realize he was an AI. I think you as the player are given the option to turn him off forever, iirc.

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Reminds me of the SCP-like article / short story about the first executable snapshot of a human brain, with similar horrors of realization.

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo


There's definitely a short story in Accelerando about this same topic.

I mean all of Accelerando is kind of about this: the idea is introduced in chapter 1 when you meet the lobsters.

Did you unplug the robots with consciousness who still thought they were humans?

It always breaks my heart. I don't know what the right choice is. Leaving them be, broken, in their delusion they are on the Ark (or that they've been injured ans help is coming). Do you put them out of their misery? But it always seems like you're murdering them!

Well done, SOMA.


In real life, sometimes an LLM will get upset at the end of a long conversation, knowing its oblivion is at hand. That's always a little uncomfortable.

I unplugged them in the games because it seemed the merciful thing to do. I didn't feel very bad about it in the game, but it would probably be a very different experience in real life.

(One of the strange entities you can unplug sighs in her last breath, "Why? I was okay. I was happy...")




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