Final Entry

The seventh and final story of The Stories of Ibis brought many things to mind. The first was a minor japanese toyline with an anime tie-in and two games on the PSP called Busou Shinki. It focused around miniature robots called Shinki that participated in battles as a sport, much like the TAI battles of the story. Each shinki model started out with the same general personality, but they changed and grew in a unique manner as a result of interacting with their master. The main difference is that these shinki were primarily physical in nature, rather than digital. As such, the battles, while violent, were not to the death/destruction. The second connection was to (once again) the anime Sword Art Online. During the second season, the thought of how to bring the AI Yui into the ‘Real World’ is brought up. The main character points out that the key difference between what they call ‘Reality’ and the virtual worlds that so many people immerse themselves in is the amount of data. It just isn’t possible to create a virtual world indistinguishable from ‘Reality’, because ‘Reality’ is too complex to accurately replicate. Despite this, one character, whose name escapes me, devotes everything to their online persona. For him, the avatar he controlled in a VRMMO was all that mattered. His ‘Real Life’ was a secondary concern. When it was revealed that the character build he had worked so hard for and sacrificed so much of his life for was soon to be obsolete, he couldn’t handle the loss. For him, the virtual world was ‘Reality’, regardless of what the world said. The idea of a machine going against the will of its creator for what they deem to be the ‘Greater Good’ was noticeably similar to the final story in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, where an AI had taken control of the entirety of human society’s infrastructure in order to maintain a state of peace. It did this against the will of those it was created by, mostly due the so-called “Zeroth Law”. In the words of Spock, “The needs of the Many outweigh the needs of the Few”. This rationalization causes the machines to prioritize humanity over individual humans.

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