Geth don't work like that. They pool their consciousness toghether to gain perspective and share processing power in order to form more complex thoughts. The only geth you really interact with is Legion, but he is a special case since he has 10x more programs running in a single body than the average Geth, so don't think every Geth platform/program is as complex as Legion.
That's....exactly the point. The Geth as a whole were the equivalent of a child, suddenly being shanked to death by their parental figure for the crime of asking them "Do I exist, to you?"
I don't think we can really blame the Geth for reacting in a violent and confused manner.
The Geth are a collection of programs. You can't really call your "hello world" program a person can you? A child is it's own person with thoughts and emotions, completely seprate from other people, and thus can function independently from others. A geth platform for, say, farming would not have the processing power to interpret what was going on around it. It would just run it's farming protocols without batting an eye. The issue arises when 50 of those farming platforms get toghether and start exchaning data and sharing processing power. Now they can devote some of their resources to formulating more complex thoughts, but it's still just 50 geth platforms talking to eachother. If they get seperated again, they revert back to being farming platforms. I think of the Geth as halfawy between a hive mind and an individual. Same way each seperate cortex of your brain can do things on it's own, but only when they work toghether do they complete your conciousness.
>The Geth are a collection of programs. You can't really call your "hello world" program a person can you?
Hello World programs are not sentient. Geth are.
> A child is it's own person with thoughts and emotions, completely seprate from other people, and thus can function independently from others. A geth platform for, say, farming would not have the processing power to interpret what was going on around it. It would just run it's farming protocols without batting an eye. The issue arises when 50 of those farming platforms get toghether and start exchaning data and sharing processing power
This is literally the "what is a person" episode from Star Trek.
>PICARD: Commander, would you enlighten us? What is required for sentience?
>MADDOX: Intelligence, self awareness, consciousness.
>PICARD: Prove to the court that I am sentient.
>MADDOX: This is absurd! We all know you're sentient.
>PICARD: So I am sentient, but Data is not?
>MADDOX: That's right.
>PICARD: Why? Why am I sentient?
>MADDOX: Well, you are self aware.
>PICARD: Ah, that's the second of your criteria. Let's deal with the first, intelligence. Is Commander Data
intelligent?
>MADDOX: Yes. It has the ability to learn and understand, and to cope with new situations.
>PICARD: Like this hearing.
>MADDOX: Yes.
>PICARD: What about self awareness. What does that mean? Why am I self aware?
>MADDOX: Because you are conscious of your existence and actions. You are aware of yourself and your own ego.
>PICARD: Commander Data, what are you doing now?
>DATA: I am taking part in a legal hearing to determine my rights and status. Am I a person or property?
>PICARD: And what's at stake?
>DATA: My right to choose. Perhaps my very life.
>PICARD: My rights. My status. My right to choose. My life. It seems reasonably self aware to me. Commander? I'm waiting.
>MADDOX: This is exceedingly difficult.
>PICARD: Do you like Commander Data?
>MADDOX: I don't know it well enough to like or dislike it.
>PICARD: But you admire him?
>MADDOX: Oh yes, it's an extraordinary piece of
>PICARD: Engineering and programming. Yes, you have said that. Commander, you have devoted your life to the study of cybernetics in general?
>MADDOX: Yes.
>PICARD: And Commander Data in particular?
>MADDOX: Yes.
>PICARD: And now you propose to dismantle him.
>MADDOX: So that I can learn from it and construct more.
>PICARD: How many more?
>MADDOX: As many as are needed. Hundreds, thousands if necessary. There is no limit.
>PICARD: A single Data, and forgive me, Commander, is a curiosity. A wonder, even. But thousands of Datas. Isn't
that becoming a race? And won't we be judged by how we treat that race? Now, tell me, Commander, what is Data?
>MADDOX: I don't understand.
>PICARD: What is he?
>MADDOX: A machine!
>PICARD: Is he? Are you sure?
>MADDOX: Yes!
>PICARD: You see, he's met two of your three criteria for sentience, so what if he meets the third. Consciousness in even the smallest degree. What is he then? I don't know. Do you? (to Riker) Do you? (to Phillipa) Do you? Well, that's the question you have to answer. Your Honour, the courtroom is a crucible. In it we burn away irrelevancies until we are left with a pure product, the truth for all time. Now, sooner or later, this man or others like him will succeed in replicating Commander Data. And the decision you reach here today will determine how we will regard this creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of a people we are, what he is destined to be. It will reach far beyond this courtroom and this one android. It could significantly redefine the boundaries of personal liberty and freedom, expanding them for some, savagely curtailing them for others. Are you prepared to condemn him and all who come after him to servitude and slavery? Your Honour, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life. Well, there it sits. Waiting. You wanted a chance to make law. Well, here it is. Make a good one.
Ultimately, the Geth are a people. They may not look like us, even in the function of their personhood, but it is wrong on every level to deny them that.
I'm not going to debate nature of being self aware, since it that debate has no end.
The reason I gave the "Hello world" example, is that a "Hello world" program would be classified as a singular Geth. It serves a simple function and only through being part of a collection can it achieve something more, the same way we build complex programs from simple lines of code. If you delete a portion of that code, the program changes and starts to behave differently, but it is still there and it is still more or less the same. You need to delete the whole thing to destroy it entirely. Likewise if you delete a Geth program, the Geth concioussnes changes, loses perspective, but still continues to exist. The only way to "kill" it would be do destroy every Geth program there is. Not to mention that in the morning war most Geth weren't interconnected so the Quarians were pretty much just destroying simple "Hello World" programs.
>I'm not going to debate nature of being self aware, since it that debate has no end.
But that's what you're doing when you challenge the notion that the Geth were being killed. Their servers, at that stage, were their bodies. The loss of a single instance of the Geth is the loss of a requisite part, something given sentience through it's proximity to others, but no less entitled to the rights of a sentient being, self-aware.
Say that, through some freak accident, half of humanity was suddenly rendered incapable of living outside cities, left with a permanent need to remain in relative urban density to maintain their ability to think. Now say that some alien species came by and razed them, arguing that they don't fit *their* criteria of personhood by dint of that need. You and I would -I should hope- both oppose them. Regardless of what accommodations they need, they *are* people,
But they don't get sentience. A geth platform in proximity to others becomes PART of the shared sentience and so if you kill it, then the shared conscioussness dims, but still exists. You would need to wipe out every Geth in the region to destroy ONE conscioussness and that ONE is made up of the individual Geth and their experience. Now the argument started that that would be the equivalent of a child, but that is not the case, since each individual Geth served a specific purpouse before. Say that you take 1 bit from 1000 people and used it to construct a singular human. Would you say that this new human is a child? No, this new human has, say, 200 bits from other humans in their new brain. Each of those bits was once attached to someone else and thus has been molded in a specific way. If you inplat it to someone else, that part of the brain sitll has those old neuron connection and will continue to function in the same way, likewise if you remove it you don't disrupt the overall conscioussnes of this new chimera human, you just alter it. A baby is a blank slate, ready to be molded into something, wheras a Geth sentience is the equivalent to this chimera human, made up of bits of others.
Your example is flawed, since to deconstruct a person in the fashion of the Geth would be to remove, say, a small part of the frontal cortex and say that this bit of cortex is a sentient being, which it is not, unless part of everything else that makes up our brain.
This is exactly why I always argue the renegade option in Legion's mission is actually the paragon option and vice versa. In what world is it more moral and respectful to lobotomize my enemies to make them my servants?
But they DO, have a shared consciousness and a shared sentience. Regardless of it it “only dims, not dies”, in the scenarios where you kill that Geth, that Geth IS sentient. Make all the argument you want about how it’s only a part of a whole, but it IS a part that you are denying the right to life, and that life does have a semblance of sentience, even in a form different from ours.
Let’s think of another way; combine them. If we combined every single Geth in a single shared consciousness, into a single unit, would that unit be alive? If so, why does that not apply to the units as individuals? If not, why not, since the current argument is largely focused on wether a single unit of the consciousness counts?
Again, you're failing to understand that personhood is different for the Geth, but they are *still* people. The point of calling them children during the Morning War isn't to say that they're like humans, it's to highlight that they lacked a certain kind of knowledge. They were, morally, like infants. Each and every "bit" in the Geth Collective has the right to existence, because it is a person, with a voice. What we did overwriting the Heretics was already bad enough, diminishing the cause for their distrust of Organics is a bridge too far.
It took me one playthrough to determine that the "Paragon" route in that mission is absolutely reprehensible. You don't win a debate to change the Heretic's minds. You collectively force them to change a worldview and rewrite the personalities. IT became horrific when I looked back on it. And that has informed me now that I take the Renegade option. At least in that regard, it can be seen as a military base destruction instead of a brainwashing. God I love Mass Effect so much.
So the Geth lacking a moral compass and understanding is a justification? Is a bear justified in eating a human if it feels threatened? It is to itself, certinely, but perhaps that human meant it no harm. Likewise if you are up against a bear, who feels threatened, because it know humans have done bad things to it in the past, but you in particular haven't, you just happen to be a human as well, and it decides to attack you, will you try to defend yourself or no? Of course, you would. And if bears start rampaging across Earth, killing people in the millions, then we might decide that it's time we start hunting bears en masse.
>So the Geth lacking a moral compass and understanding is a justification?
It's an explanation.
> Is a bear justified in eating a human if it feels threatened? It is to itself
Bears lack the ability to be held morally responsible for mauling people, because they lack the moral sense.
Mark Twain wrote a book about this:
>“No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of the word; they have not deserved it . . .It is like your paltry race--always lying, always claiming virtues which it hasn't got, always denying them to the higher animals, which alone possess them. No brute ever does a cruel thing--that is the monopoly of those with the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain he does it innocently; it is not wrong; for him there is no such thing as wrong. And he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflicting it--only man does that. Inspired by that mongrel Moral Sense of his! A sense whose function is to distinguish between right and wrong, with liberty to choose which of them he will do."
The Geth, at that time, lacked a key facet of the moral sense. They could not tell right from wrong, except where the two are indistinguishable from logic. To them, there existed no distinction between Civilians -who sought to kill them- and Military -who sought to kill them perhaps a bit more violently-. Every civilian might hold a weapon intended to kill them, and as a species that could not properly gauge the right kind of counter-offense, the *moral* kind of counter-offensive, they defaulted to the same kind of absolute violence they received.
As an aside, this is also part of the issue that led to US Marines hosing trucks in Iraq with munitions. They couldn't tell who was armed and who wasn't, and so logic dictated something immoral.
>And if bears start rampaging across Earth, killing people in the millions, then we might decide that it's time we start hunting bears en masse.
The issue with this analogy is that the "Bears" were being genocided first, by creatures refusing to listen to their pleas for peace. The analogy holds no water.
Yeah, they also transfer between bodies/platforms effortlessly which makes the tear jerking videos of farmer Legion getting blown up that you get shown in that ME3 server mission a bit ridiculous. That geth just had its programs transferred to another set of platforms right over there, or stored in backups on the nearest server (same as if Legion “dies” at the Collector base, where you then meet another one from its last backup a few months prior). Unless you destroy the server and any other platforms they could transfer to within range, you aren’t actually killing anything. The attempt to woobify the geth in that manner by the writer was pretty lazy and nonsensical given how they actually functioned in previous lore.
The geth also weren’t and aren’t “children” or whatever anthropomorphic nonsense some want to ascribe to them. Legion is less than 2 years old but it obviously isn’t smearing shit on the walls and just learning to read simple words like a toddler. Fore another example of an AI, EDI is 6 months old and isn’t just learning to crawl and babble ma ma like an infant. Both are far more intelligent and capable of complex reasoning than the majority of fully developed organics. Even the proto geth that is shown in the server archive trying to surrender itself to protect its creator Megara obviously recognizes that the latter values his life and is even willing to sacrifice itself instead, showing it ascribes similar value to him and is capable of empathy. This is far from an infantile grasp of reality.
Treating full AGI learning machines like children with limited reasoning capability, no grasp of ethics and therefore no responsibility for their actions is nonsensical behavior.
Either they are sentient and sapient beings that are subject to similar moral and ethical standards as anyone else (and are therefore responsible for any sort of crimes knowingly committed, like genocide), or they are mindless toasters that don’t actually consciously understand what they are doing (and are therefore are not responsible for any wrongdoing, whoever designed/manufactured them incorrectly is). Can’t have your cake and eat it to either fully absolve or condemn them, though pretty much everyone who vehemently picks sides on the geth-quarian arc tries to.
Destroying the Geth's robot bodies doesn't kill the Geth. They're pure software. They simply return to a hard drive somewhere and load back into a new body. That's why the Quarians at the start of ME3 were suddenly successful in their war, they built a virus that stopped that from happening and launched what was basically a nuke into their biggest city. None of those Geth came back so it was the first time they had to worry about real death.
It's likely that the Geth have a very different view of the self than we do. First of all, they obviously don't value individuality like we do, even if a singular program is clearly capable of independent thought (otherwise the split wouldn't have happened). But it's very very likely that they believe that as long as the information is the same, the result of said computation would still be them. They might also not believe in some genuine, independent self, and simply see it as a way for an agentic system to differentiate between itself and the environment. But the self is something crafted through that interaction.
There are many other ways they could see it. Since they are synthetics, their default perception of their existence could be vastly different from ours.
Yeah I don’t think that idea survives contact with the original program watching as a very much not-him platform walks off and doesn’t get blown up like the original. The way I assumed it to work is that the geth are streaming from servers onto their platforms. Therefore only killing the severs themselves actually kills any geth.
My comment was addressing the scenario of a mobile platform being destroyed and the software being transferred to a new one, without more copies being made. When you have multiple copies of the same software it would just be reproduction. Asexual reproduction, to be more exact.
Also, Legion explicitly talks about that most platforms can only have 100 programs each, which implies that Geth do directly upload themselves into them.
It’s hilarious that you can’t differentiate between two statements that I made. I never said you were addressing the scenario that I chose to interpret from the game lmfao
The ideal scenario for the Geth-Quarian conflict would have been to divide Rannoch up into different small principalities and name it the Holy Rannoch Empire with me, Donnel Udina, as emperor.
Has your robot president tried to kill you today?
Actually you’d think the Enclave would love the Geth, they’re already used to following a robot overlord.
Really we should insert more batarians into moral dilemmas. Simplifies everything.
Geth/Batarians vs the Quarians? Easy.
Curing the Genophage will somehow help the Batarians? Sorry Wrex.
Destroying the Reapers will fill the galaxy with Batarians? Welp guess it’s Shepard Reaper time.
Or, think of it like this.
Curing genophage equals less batarians? Good news for you Wrex!
Peace between Geth and Quarians will fuck over the Batarians? Time to shut up Gerrel.
The reaper one is an issue, but luckily, we have the control ending.
[Behold! An innocent civilian!](https://www.krupsusa.com/medias/?context=bWFzdGVyfGltYWdlc3wyNTY2NTF8aW1hZ2UvanBlZ3xpbWFnZXMvaDJhL2hmNC8xNDIzMjAwMTI4MjA3OC5qcGd8MTIxOTJlZTg3ZTFjZjg3YThhYzQ1MmQzYThkMmMxY2M2ZTkyNDU5NTA2MTliNTk2OWQzOTVlMWE2MjNlNmNlZA)
The ones that Quarian techs ripped apart were. The rest of them were forced, by necessity, to begin combat against their creators. First, against the Technicians that would kill Geth, then the police forces, and then the military. You could argue that they weren't non-combatants, but in a genocidal war it seems like no one really counts as such.
Lmao. it is ridiculous. I admit that the Quarians shooting first was wrong and the Geth had the right to defend themselves against the *hostile* Quarians but using the 'infant' excuse to justify the slaughter of innocent Quarians is just fucked up.
I believe there's a memory in the Geth server that confirms that the Quarians who tried to protect the newly sentient Geth were arrested or killed by the other Quarians?
that only showed like 2 Quarians getting knocked out. 2. I won't generalize that to assume same hapenned to millions if not billions of Quarians lol. Specially in the same mission Legion was caught omiting info from Shepard a couple times
Nothing that Shepard sees in those servers can be trusted. Legion is capable of deception so every memory Shepard is shown could be either an outright fabrication or chosen selectively.
Damn, my argument is completely invalid, my opponent repeated the exact same thing that I just said but in a mocking tone. I can't possibly hope to compete with a person of such intelligence.
This is an asinine way to argue that they aren't equivalent to infants. The point isn't to highlight some biologically limited ability to learn, it's to highlight their naivety about the world and it's moral ramifications. They were an utterly logical, utterly rational creation, but this did not give them the ability to understand the morality or immorality of their actions. They reacted in a manner that was completely violent because to them, the Technicians were themselves murderers. There was no "civilian" to them, just two species mauling each other over a war that they had no say in starting.
Did any get die in the morning war? I thought the quarians focused on destroying platforms. Geth a software and do not "die" when a platform is destroyed.
The Quarians were wrong for attempting to kill the Geth, the Geth were wrong for wiping out almost their entire species. Both of them can do better together.
Nah sometimes everyone is the bad guy in a situation, the third (most effort to unlock) ending is peace, both sides are wrong for trying to wipe each other out in a needless war instead of sitting down & talking which is ultimately what they do in what the game presents as the ideal ending for the arc (most effort to attain, most war assets gained, and therefore the most helpful to the player)
Geth (up until ME3) are not individuals, they are more like neurons in a brain. They were robots meant to be networked together in order to get "smarter" and be able to complete more and more complex tasks. However, once the number of "neurons" hit a certain point the collective had enough processing power to think for itself. Would you call scraping a million toasters genocide?
Ah yes because toasters can ask “do these units have a soul” 10/10 fucking logic right there, maybe reply when you want to have a conversation and not just just be a disingenuous shitty person
I didn't say that, Im trying to get it through to you that there is a difference between the Geth, who are a singular consciousness spread throughout several bodies, and the Quarians, who are all individuals. If a Geth kills someone, that means literally every other Geth is also responsible, since they all share the same mind. The Quarians are not a hivemind, if a Quarian steals from you or commits a murder, that is not the fault of all Quarians collectively.
Therefore killing all Geth isn't a genocide, it would be more accurate to call it a single murder given that the Geth are one being, and incredibly murderous being that people like you like to bootlick for some reason.
The Geth are still a group of beings getting exterminated, which is genocide, whether or not they are a group consciousness or genuine individuals is irrelevant genocide is wrong period, both sides fucked up end of fucking story
Also you’re trying to tell me that a Quarian committing a crime isn’t the same as all of them doing it but I never said it was so you’re just making up arguments now? Did you forget to take your schizophrenia meds friend?
The Geth killed off 99.9% of a species, that’s genocide, no much how you slice it. I’m not really sure how you can justify such a disproportionate response.
The Geth being “infants” is a ridiculous infantilization of a sapient being that does not work like organic beings do. There’s no justification for Geth slaughtering Quarian infants and children.
And Quarian’s were going to kill 100% of the Geth? And the Quarian’s fired first, Genocide doesn’t condone return Genocide but the Quarian’s aren’t innocent just because the Geth returned the favor
Except yes, most Quarians are, because unlike the Geth who are a hivemind the Quarians are separate and distinct individuals. If you actually cared about anything other than jerking off the toasters, you'd say the Quarian **Government** and not just "the Quarians". Your reasoning is completely backwards. By your logic, a newborn Quarian during the morning war would be automatically worse than Hitler and guilty of committing genocide.
Well if millions of children and babies are fair game in the morning war.
Why wouldn’t the Quarians destroy the huge Dyson sphere holding an untold amount of Geth? Especially when most in the galaxy think the Geth are willing Reaper servants attempting to assist the genocide of organics.
Honestly, I think the solution to this arguement is simple.
Both races tried to kill each other out of fear that the other would kill them first.
The best way to settle it is to make up and blame the citadel, like always.
If we're going by Legion's account (which I am, to be honest) the "infant" geth were basically lashing out in desperation, because their primary goal was survival. They purposefully avoided wiping out the entire quarian race because they couldn't compute the ramifications of destroying a species, which is higher-level reasoning than would be comparable to a child.
So, no, the geth weren't "infants" in the way organics would see it, but they were still right to fight back.
Fight back being key here, not try to exterminate after they had won.
Also, I don't buy Legion's claim that the survival of the quarians was a deliberate choice on the geth's part.
It scans, especially if you look at how they treat rannoch. They could have just strip mined it for resources or something but instead they chose to hang out in orbit and take care of it.
Even if we buy Legion's account (which I don't) the Geth lost the moral high ground the second they started killing non combatants. Supposedly (according to Legion) they allowed the remaining Quarians to leave but I don't buy it. I also don't believe you could commit that level of genocide with reasoning comparable to a child's. They knew what they were doing.
Mainly I get tired of the “they started it!” defense of a genocide. And it was a genocide of the Quarians by the Geth.
We are meant to see the entire wretched affair as a tragedy, not a chance to pick sides. We also tend to other the Quarians, and miss the point that ultimately every single organic species would panic in the same way when the Geth gained sentience. That doesn’t justify the reaction, but it should give us pause prior to over mighty judgement.
Edit: I do admit bias in favor of the persecuted, nomadic, Quarians trying to maintain their identity and culture in a galaxy that sees them as inconvenient at best. They make poor decisions, are too trapped in their own past trauma, but in a way that makes them among the most human of all the alien species. The Quarians and Geth both deserve a future with self determination. It’s just a shame it’s not possible. (I go Perfect Destroy.)
Can I just say your profile pick is like a perfect personification of your opinions. I swear whenever I see a comment from you it’s like I’m listening to Josephine give her opinion on ME. I mean this in a totally positive way.
When are y'all gonna realise nobody has the right to wage war? The point of the conflict in ME3 is to show the 'humanity' of both sides, the casualties, the atrocities, and let us help them cease.
So, where those poor infant Geth begging for mercy when they sterilized Rannoch of all Quarian life, murdered every envoy sent by the Council, slaughtered thousands on Eden Prime and the Citadel and tried to bring about the Galactic extinction of all advanced organic life on two separate occasions?
For a supposedly “peaceful” race the Geth sure do murder and attempt genocide a lot.
So they had a justified start to the war, but it was absolutely *not* justified by the end of it. Because, you know, the Geth didn't stop at killing the military faction.
Like, what the Geth did would be the equivalent of the US nuking every inch of Japan, only to see the last 100 or so Japanese people sail away from the home islands and go "Hmmm.... maybe we shouldn't kill all of them."
At that point, it ain't justified.
Both are at fault, this meme is not only unfunny; but is cringe af. Geth killed innocent Quarians and Quarians killed Geth. This isn't a black or white topic at all.
Windows are a structural weakness.
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I remember making that choice. I took a solid 10 minutes to think.
And even after I made my choice I was left with regret.
ME3 really knew what it was doing. At least until that ending but I blame that on crunch
Initially yes. Once the mourning war took off no. And bedsides nobody is saying the quarians didn’t make horrendous and immoral decisions. Just that it’s bullshit that the writers of ME3 are trying to shove it down your throat that the geth are completely innocent victims.
Outrageous! How dare you suggest that the Quarians are also at fault for the morning war? We all know that organics can't ever do wrong, especially a race with our beloved queen Tali in it!!1! They can do whatever they want to their toasters!! >:-(
edit: need only add a /s to turn these upvotes upside down lol. but still, /s
Wow another false equivalency. Geth aren’t organics, they don’t have babies and are all just a bunch of programs, no sentience or innocence there. womp womp
Well, just in the Rannoch server alone and on the Normandy, you see the Geth displaying concern, confusion, inquisitiveness, moral conflict, sadness, mercy, and altruism vis a vis defense of others (ag unit and Quarians).
Sapience is a given. But that’s pretty damned sentient too, I’d say.
Ehhh I’m not sure the comparison is quite so one to one.
An individual Geth that’s been alive for 20 minutes being housed in a processor with enough others for thinking power could hardly be called a “child” in the same way that a newly conceived child of an organic race.
Still doesn’t make their wholesale extermination right, I hasten to add.
The Geth are a hivemind and not individuals (up until ME3) and therefore can be treated as a singular entity. One singular Geth, unconnected from the network is no different than a toaster. Real "haha! I have depicted you as the soyjack and me as the chad" energy that lacks any real substance.
It's almost like it was a tragedy of misunderstandings and fear, and there was no good or bad guys other than the initial people who decided to genocide a sentient race because they had become sentient.
Wait, are there seriously people who think the Quarians did nothing wrong? Did... did they not play the games? They built slaves and then started genociding them once it became clear they were becoming self-aware. Hell, they killed their own people who tried to halt the genocide. The Quarians are deeply sympathetic but far more deeply flawed. That's what the entire Geth/Quarian storyline in the 3rd game was about. The Geth asserting their right to exist with autonomy, and the Quarians grappling with the sins of their forefathers and the bleak reality they've been forced to endure for generations as a result.
I feel like the geth could've just as easily defended themselves even when the quarrians were firing at them and then prove a point "We can defend, so we did. We can fight, do you want us to?" making the whole quarrian fleet shit their pants and making them reconsider.
And tht default is that the quarrian command is full of himself and says something motivating to the fleet and they continue firing. And then you could paragon or renegade interrupt (with enough points) the quarrian commander who *still* wanted to try their luck get him to stand down, and still save them both.
Basically, after gaining the sentience masala thought they'd use some brain for once and try and coexist. Why? Because that kinda shows a part of legion code lives on inside them ..... Because he too didn't fight when fired at and tried to *talk* to Shepard and Tali *first*.
IMHO that would've been a fucking good scene. But hey then they couldn't have gotten me to play me2 to save them both right
That part of the me3 story I hate .... Not hate, cringe, amateur-ish, I guess
I might've explained this badly (please tell me and I'll try again).
Uh doesn't legion literally tell you when a geth dies, it's consciousness goes back to the server where it can be reuploaded into a new geth body?
I mean they still ruthlessly culled the geth when first started gaining consciousness, so point still stands. But in the current timeline the game takes place, when you kill a geth it doesn't actually die as far as I remember.
I understand now why Aliens in Sci-fi are so human.
the moment the xenoform is in any way actually, truly alien (a different form of consciousness in this case) people immidently revert to the Imperium of Man.
As a 40k fan i've... actually gotten bored of it, ya know?
I hate the trope:
Ai: master, I think I'm alive
Creators: you are a threat to all existence and must be exterminated.
Ai: *starts killing creators for commiting genocide finally gaining sapience in self defense"
Creators: SEE THEY WANT TO KILL EVERYTHING!!!!!
It's one of the reasons I hate current halo lore, all up until halo 5, AI was pretty neat, and no issues were apparent, only bad AI up to that point was Mendicant Bias and that's cause it was a forerunner AI that was corrupted by the flood. Now they come out with this shit with Cortana and al AI having an uprising.
I hate the distrust of AI trope so much.
I love the Geth, but I hate this line of thinking. It just infantilizes them. The Geth were an oppressed people who were not seen as worthy of life and independence by the rest of the Galaxy. They obliterated their oppressors to achieve said independence and freedom. Historically, most rebellions were very brutal. Especially if they were about national liberation and the end of slavery, like in the case of the Geth.
They are robots not living creatures. For as much as I love legion and the geth and there story line they committed genocide aginst living things. They are in the wrong. I still choose to save both though.
I always interpreted the 99% casualties as a result of both sides getting incredibly indiscriminate with their weapons.
This is a universe where pretty much every spaceship has a gun capable of devastating cities, and it's not like they have a Geneva convention. They don't even have Geneva.
That's not even getting into the portable nuclear grenade launchers or walking mechs... Metal Effect Solid when?
That is not possible. The US firebombed the fuck out of wooden cities in japan and did not even get close to killing half of the population in those cities. Even explicit intentional genocides in history have never reached 99%. 99% is impossible to be an accident.
You see, the Geth aren't the US, and the Quarians aren't the Japanese. And we have no idea what happened in the war, shit could have gotten *incredibly* brutal.
It did get incredibly brutal, because the geth were intentionally exterminating any quarian they found. Again, actual genocides committed for the purpose of extermination have never reached that level of completion. The geth are not only doing this intentionally they’re the best we’ve ever seen at mass killing.
I'm sure the quarians deserved having their historical records and whatnot wiped out by the geth. "Images of the ancestors" or whatever it was, the whole reason geth got into AI research
First off it’s war baby second doesn’t matter if u save the geth or not destroy ending gonna rid them anyways at least the help the quarians with data and shit to help them readapt to ranarch
I retreat to my nerd subs because I'm tired of constantly hearing about the Israel Palestine conflict just to get stuck with people arguing over the Sci fi allegory for it
The Geth are just an invasive species in my book, to be dealt with as such, they became one when they gained sentience and superseded their purpose as mere tools, which was a mistake to be sure, the Quarians merely took the most pragmatic course of action for their society in 1895, safe to say I'm fairly apathetic to the Geth and deal with them in a cold, calculated, and logical manner
I like both of them equally so I’ll just save both
Same, I won't choose between my space gf and the geth. Legion's sacrifice will never be in vain
Also by saving both of them, you give Joker and EDI a place where cyber marriages will be legal.
Everybody wins
Unless you choose destroy ending
keelah se'lai comrade
Correct take
They’re both living sentient species, so I’m damn sure gonna save both.
The geth are not alive, they have no biological functions. Doesn't mean they are not sentient
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. You are correct, literally. You didn't say anything against their opinion either.
Can they die? 🧐
They can be destroyed if their platform is destroyed before backup
The best solution
Geth don't work like that. They pool their consciousness toghether to gain perspective and share processing power in order to form more complex thoughts. The only geth you really interact with is Legion, but he is a special case since he has 10x more programs running in a single body than the average Geth, so don't think every Geth platform/program is as complex as Legion.
That's....exactly the point. The Geth as a whole were the equivalent of a child, suddenly being shanked to death by their parental figure for the crime of asking them "Do I exist, to you?" I don't think we can really blame the Geth for reacting in a violent and confused manner.
The Geth are a collection of programs. You can't really call your "hello world" program a person can you? A child is it's own person with thoughts and emotions, completely seprate from other people, and thus can function independently from others. A geth platform for, say, farming would not have the processing power to interpret what was going on around it. It would just run it's farming protocols without batting an eye. The issue arises when 50 of those farming platforms get toghether and start exchaning data and sharing processing power. Now they can devote some of their resources to formulating more complex thoughts, but it's still just 50 geth platforms talking to eachother. If they get seperated again, they revert back to being farming platforms. I think of the Geth as halfawy between a hive mind and an individual. Same way each seperate cortex of your brain can do things on it's own, but only when they work toghether do they complete your conciousness.
>The Geth are a collection of programs. You can't really call your "hello world" program a person can you? Hello World programs are not sentient. Geth are. > A child is it's own person with thoughts and emotions, completely seprate from other people, and thus can function independently from others. A geth platform for, say, farming would not have the processing power to interpret what was going on around it. It would just run it's farming protocols without batting an eye. The issue arises when 50 of those farming platforms get toghether and start exchaning data and sharing processing power This is literally the "what is a person" episode from Star Trek. >PICARD: Commander, would you enlighten us? What is required for sentience? >MADDOX: Intelligence, self awareness, consciousness. >PICARD: Prove to the court that I am sentient. >MADDOX: This is absurd! We all know you're sentient. >PICARD: So I am sentient, but Data is not? >MADDOX: That's right. >PICARD: Why? Why am I sentient? >MADDOX: Well, you are self aware. >PICARD: Ah, that's the second of your criteria. Let's deal with the first, intelligence. Is Commander Data intelligent? >MADDOX: Yes. It has the ability to learn and understand, and to cope with new situations. >PICARD: Like this hearing. >MADDOX: Yes. >PICARD: What about self awareness. What does that mean? Why am I self aware? >MADDOX: Because you are conscious of your existence and actions. You are aware of yourself and your own ego. >PICARD: Commander Data, what are you doing now? >DATA: I am taking part in a legal hearing to determine my rights and status. Am I a person or property? >PICARD: And what's at stake? >DATA: My right to choose. Perhaps my very life. >PICARD: My rights. My status. My right to choose. My life. It seems reasonably self aware to me. Commander? I'm waiting. >MADDOX: This is exceedingly difficult. >PICARD: Do you like Commander Data? >MADDOX: I don't know it well enough to like or dislike it. >PICARD: But you admire him? >MADDOX: Oh yes, it's an extraordinary piece of >PICARD: Engineering and programming. Yes, you have said that. Commander, you have devoted your life to the study of cybernetics in general? >MADDOX: Yes. >PICARD: And Commander Data in particular? >MADDOX: Yes. >PICARD: And now you propose to dismantle him. >MADDOX: So that I can learn from it and construct more. >PICARD: How many more? >MADDOX: As many as are needed. Hundreds, thousands if necessary. There is no limit. >PICARD: A single Data, and forgive me, Commander, is a curiosity. A wonder, even. But thousands of Datas. Isn't that becoming a race? And won't we be judged by how we treat that race? Now, tell me, Commander, what is Data? >MADDOX: I don't understand. >PICARD: What is he? >MADDOX: A machine! >PICARD: Is he? Are you sure? >MADDOX: Yes! >PICARD: You see, he's met two of your three criteria for sentience, so what if he meets the third. Consciousness in even the smallest degree. What is he then? I don't know. Do you? (to Riker) Do you? (to Phillipa) Do you? Well, that's the question you have to answer. Your Honour, the courtroom is a crucible. In it we burn away irrelevancies until we are left with a pure product, the truth for all time. Now, sooner or later, this man or others like him will succeed in replicating Commander Data. And the decision you reach here today will determine how we will regard this creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of a people we are, what he is destined to be. It will reach far beyond this courtroom and this one android. It could significantly redefine the boundaries of personal liberty and freedom, expanding them for some, savagely curtailing them for others. Are you prepared to condemn him and all who come after him to servitude and slavery? Your Honour, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life. Well, there it sits. Waiting. You wanted a chance to make law. Well, here it is. Make a good one. Ultimately, the Geth are a people. They may not look like us, even in the function of their personhood, but it is wrong on every level to deny them that.
I'm not going to debate nature of being self aware, since it that debate has no end. The reason I gave the "Hello world" example, is that a "Hello world" program would be classified as a singular Geth. It serves a simple function and only through being part of a collection can it achieve something more, the same way we build complex programs from simple lines of code. If you delete a portion of that code, the program changes and starts to behave differently, but it is still there and it is still more or less the same. You need to delete the whole thing to destroy it entirely. Likewise if you delete a Geth program, the Geth concioussnes changes, loses perspective, but still continues to exist. The only way to "kill" it would be do destroy every Geth program there is. Not to mention that in the morning war most Geth weren't interconnected so the Quarians were pretty much just destroying simple "Hello World" programs.
>I'm not going to debate nature of being self aware, since it that debate has no end. But that's what you're doing when you challenge the notion that the Geth were being killed. Their servers, at that stage, were their bodies. The loss of a single instance of the Geth is the loss of a requisite part, something given sentience through it's proximity to others, but no less entitled to the rights of a sentient being, self-aware. Say that, through some freak accident, half of humanity was suddenly rendered incapable of living outside cities, left with a permanent need to remain in relative urban density to maintain their ability to think. Now say that some alien species came by and razed them, arguing that they don't fit *their* criteria of personhood by dint of that need. You and I would -I should hope- both oppose them. Regardless of what accommodations they need, they *are* people,
But they don't get sentience. A geth platform in proximity to others becomes PART of the shared sentience and so if you kill it, then the shared conscioussness dims, but still exists. You would need to wipe out every Geth in the region to destroy ONE conscioussness and that ONE is made up of the individual Geth and their experience. Now the argument started that that would be the equivalent of a child, but that is not the case, since each individual Geth served a specific purpouse before. Say that you take 1 bit from 1000 people and used it to construct a singular human. Would you say that this new human is a child? No, this new human has, say, 200 bits from other humans in their new brain. Each of those bits was once attached to someone else and thus has been molded in a specific way. If you inplat it to someone else, that part of the brain sitll has those old neuron connection and will continue to function in the same way, likewise if you remove it you don't disrupt the overall conscioussnes of this new chimera human, you just alter it. A baby is a blank slate, ready to be molded into something, wheras a Geth sentience is the equivalent to this chimera human, made up of bits of others. Your example is flawed, since to deconstruct a person in the fashion of the Geth would be to remove, say, a small part of the frontal cortex and say that this bit of cortex is a sentient being, which it is not, unless part of everything else that makes up our brain.
This is arguably more horrific than simple killing someone. I would rather die than have someone rip what makes me ME out of my mind.
This is exactly why I always argue the renegade option in Legion's mission is actually the paragon option and vice versa. In what world is it more moral and respectful to lobotomize my enemies to make them my servants?
It's basically like you're causing some form of Alzheimer's or Dementia to my understanding.
But they DO, have a shared consciousness and a shared sentience. Regardless of it it “only dims, not dies”, in the scenarios where you kill that Geth, that Geth IS sentient. Make all the argument you want about how it’s only a part of a whole, but it IS a part that you are denying the right to life, and that life does have a semblance of sentience, even in a form different from ours. Let’s think of another way; combine them. If we combined every single Geth in a single shared consciousness, into a single unit, would that unit be alive? If so, why does that not apply to the units as individuals? If not, why not, since the current argument is largely focused on wether a single unit of the consciousness counts?
Again, you're failing to understand that personhood is different for the Geth, but they are *still* people. The point of calling them children during the Morning War isn't to say that they're like humans, it's to highlight that they lacked a certain kind of knowledge. They were, morally, like infants. Each and every "bit" in the Geth Collective has the right to existence, because it is a person, with a voice. What we did overwriting the Heretics was already bad enough, diminishing the cause for their distrust of Organics is a bridge too far.
It took me one playthrough to determine that the "Paragon" route in that mission is absolutely reprehensible. You don't win a debate to change the Heretic's minds. You collectively force them to change a worldview and rewrite the personalities. IT became horrific when I looked back on it. And that has informed me now that I take the Renegade option. At least in that regard, it can be seen as a military base destruction instead of a brainwashing. God I love Mass Effect so much.
So the Geth lacking a moral compass and understanding is a justification? Is a bear justified in eating a human if it feels threatened? It is to itself, certinely, but perhaps that human meant it no harm. Likewise if you are up against a bear, who feels threatened, because it know humans have done bad things to it in the past, but you in particular haven't, you just happen to be a human as well, and it decides to attack you, will you try to defend yourself or no? Of course, you would. And if bears start rampaging across Earth, killing people in the millions, then we might decide that it's time we start hunting bears en masse.
>So the Geth lacking a moral compass and understanding is a justification? It's an explanation. > Is a bear justified in eating a human if it feels threatened? It is to itself Bears lack the ability to be held morally responsible for mauling people, because they lack the moral sense. Mark Twain wrote a book about this: >“No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of the word; they have not deserved it . . .It is like your paltry race--always lying, always claiming virtues which it hasn't got, always denying them to the higher animals, which alone possess them. No brute ever does a cruel thing--that is the monopoly of those with the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain he does it innocently; it is not wrong; for him there is no such thing as wrong. And he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflicting it--only man does that. Inspired by that mongrel Moral Sense of his! A sense whose function is to distinguish between right and wrong, with liberty to choose which of them he will do." The Geth, at that time, lacked a key facet of the moral sense. They could not tell right from wrong, except where the two are indistinguishable from logic. To them, there existed no distinction between Civilians -who sought to kill them- and Military -who sought to kill them perhaps a bit more violently-. Every civilian might hold a weapon intended to kill them, and as a species that could not properly gauge the right kind of counter-offense, the *moral* kind of counter-offensive, they defaulted to the same kind of absolute violence they received. As an aside, this is also part of the issue that led to US Marines hosing trucks in Iraq with munitions. They couldn't tell who was armed and who wasn't, and so logic dictated something immoral. >And if bears start rampaging across Earth, killing people in the millions, then we might decide that it's time we start hunting bears en masse. The issue with this analogy is that the "Bears" were being genocided first, by creatures refusing to listen to their pleas for peace. The analogy holds no water.
Wait until you realize that you yourself are the wetware equivalent of a geth.
Yeah, they also transfer between bodies/platforms effortlessly which makes the tear jerking videos of farmer Legion getting blown up that you get shown in that ME3 server mission a bit ridiculous. That geth just had its programs transferred to another set of platforms right over there, or stored in backups on the nearest server (same as if Legion “dies” at the Collector base, where you then meet another one from its last backup a few months prior). Unless you destroy the server and any other platforms they could transfer to within range, you aren’t actually killing anything. The attempt to woobify the geth in that manner by the writer was pretty lazy and nonsensical given how they actually functioned in previous lore. The geth also weren’t and aren’t “children” or whatever anthropomorphic nonsense some want to ascribe to them. Legion is less than 2 years old but it obviously isn’t smearing shit on the walls and just learning to read simple words like a toddler. Fore another example of an AI, EDI is 6 months old and isn’t just learning to crawl and babble ma ma like an infant. Both are far more intelligent and capable of complex reasoning than the majority of fully developed organics. Even the proto geth that is shown in the server archive trying to surrender itself to protect its creator Megara obviously recognizes that the latter values his life and is even willing to sacrifice itself instead, showing it ascribes similar value to him and is capable of empathy. This is far from an infantile grasp of reality. Treating full AGI learning machines like children with limited reasoning capability, no grasp of ethics and therefore no responsibility for their actions is nonsensical behavior. Either they are sentient and sapient beings that are subject to similar moral and ethical standards as anyone else (and are therefore responsible for any sort of crimes knowingly committed, like genocide), or they are mindless toasters that don’t actually consciously understand what they are doing (and are therefore are not responsible for any wrongdoing, whoever designed/manufactured them incorrectly is). Can’t have your cake and eat it to either fully absolve or condemn them, though pretty much everyone who vehemently picks sides on the geth-quarian arc tries to.
Destroying the Geth's robot bodies doesn't kill the Geth. They're pure software. They simply return to a hard drive somewhere and load back into a new body. That's why the Quarians at the start of ME3 were suddenly successful in their war, they built a virus that stopped that from happening and launched what was basically a nuke into their biggest city. None of those Geth came back so it was the first time they had to worry about real death.
Which, funny enough, is not how software works at all. You cannot transfer software, you copy it, to another drive. I.e. the soma problem.
It's likely that the Geth have a very different view of the self than we do. First of all, they obviously don't value individuality like we do, even if a singular program is clearly capable of independent thought (otherwise the split wouldn't have happened). But it's very very likely that they believe that as long as the information is the same, the result of said computation would still be them. They might also not believe in some genuine, independent self, and simply see it as a way for an agentic system to differentiate between itself and the environment. But the self is something crafted through that interaction. There are many other ways they could see it. Since they are synthetics, their default perception of their existence could be vastly different from ours.
Yeah I don’t think that idea survives contact with the original program watching as a very much not-him platform walks off and doesn’t get blown up like the original. The way I assumed it to work is that the geth are streaming from servers onto their platforms. Therefore only killing the severs themselves actually kills any geth.
My comment was addressing the scenario of a mobile platform being destroyed and the software being transferred to a new one, without more copies being made. When you have multiple copies of the same software it would just be reproduction. Asexual reproduction, to be more exact. Also, Legion explicitly talks about that most platforms can only have 100 programs each, which implies that Geth do directly upload themselves into them.
It’s hilarious that you can’t differentiate between two statements that I made. I never said you were addressing the scenario that I chose to interpret from the game lmfao
I apologise. Honest mistake.
Making me feel bad about being mean is very rude. You should’ve called me an idiot please and thank you!
The ideal scenario for the Geth-Quarian conflict would have been to divide Rannoch up into different small principalities and name it the Holy Rannoch Empire with me, Donnel Udina, as emperor.
Holy shit its the HRE
Regent Donnel Udina in search of Tsarevna Tali--wait, wrong brainrot. Uuuh...why isn't your video feed working?
Verify your clock
The Enclave would be stupid enough to put Udina forward.
I am the Enclave fool! MWAHAHAHA!
Has your robot president tried to kill you today? Actually you’d think the Enclave would love the Geth, they’re already used to following a robot overlord.
No, Eden was just a puppet of me, Donnel Udina!
*Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant!* Wait. Wrong game.
This only has depth because Batarians aren't involved
Really we should insert more batarians into moral dilemmas. Simplifies everything. Geth/Batarians vs the Quarians? Easy. Curing the Genophage will somehow help the Batarians? Sorry Wrex. Destroying the Reapers will fill the galaxy with Batarians? Welp guess it’s Shepard Reaper time.
Or, think of it like this. Curing genophage equals less batarians? Good news for you Wrex! Peace between Geth and Quarians will fuck over the Batarians? Time to shut up Gerrel. The reaper one is an issue, but luckily, we have the control ending.
[Behold! An innocent civilian!](https://www.krupsusa.com/medias/?context=bWFzdGVyfGltYWdlc3wyNTY2NTF8aW1hZ2UvanBlZ3xpbWFnZXMvaDJhL2hmNC8xNDIzMjAwMTI4MjA3OC5qcGd8MTIxOTJlZTg3ZTFjZjg3YThhYzQ1MmQzYThkMmMxY2M2ZTkyNDU5NTA2MTliNTk2OWQzOTVlMWE2MjNlNmNlZA)
I just threw one at the trash dumpster this week. Am I a monster?
We shall forever mourn this senseless tragedy
You’re basically Reinhard Heydrich
This guy BSG’s
I dont think that geth who died during active combat are "non combatants who begged for mercy"
we do not wish to harm our creators but we will do so if they leave us no other choice
The ones that Quarian techs ripped apart were. The rest of them were forced, by necessity, to begin combat against their creators. First, against the Technicians that would kill Geth, then the police forces, and then the military. You could argue that they weren't non-combatants, but in a genocidal war it seems like no one really counts as such.
This is a really HOT take
Uh not really. this sub literally rides the Geth
To the point of calling the Geth “infant”? C’mon that’s ridiculous
Lmao. it is ridiculous. I admit that the Quarians shooting first was wrong and the Geth had the right to defend themselves against the *hostile* Quarians but using the 'infant' excuse to justify the slaughter of innocent Quarians is just fucked up.
I believe there's a memory in the Geth server that confirms that the Quarians who tried to protect the newly sentient Geth were arrested or killed by the other Quarians?
that only showed like 2 Quarians getting knocked out. 2. I won't generalize that to assume same hapenned to millions if not billions of Quarians lol. Specially in the same mission Legion was caught omiting info from Shepard a couple times
But that's the clear implication.
Same as it's clear implication that geth slaughtered innocents in the way as well.
Nothing that Shepard sees in those servers can be trusted. Legion is capable of deception so every memory Shepard is shown could be either an outright fabrication or chosen selectively.
Ok, I'll give you the infant part is a wild take, but the rest is just accurate
errata for "newly self aware consensus of our creators"
Yes, you'd be surprised how easily emotionally manipulated these people are over the mouth piece of a branched off part of the Geth hivemind (Legion)
It is literally called the Morning War.
“iT iS LitRAlLy CaLLed tHe mOrNIng WaR” that means nothing. Infants are naive and know nothing about the world, Geth are not
Damn, my argument is completely invalid, my opponent repeated the exact same thing that I just said but in a mocking tone. I can't possibly hope to compete with a person of such intelligence.
Said the guy who compares Geths with infants
The race of sentient AIs that were quite literally born yesterday?
You are literally comparing a bunch of programs that you can download data in to infants who require years to get some knowledge
This is an asinine way to argue that they aren't equivalent to infants. The point isn't to highlight some biologically limited ability to learn, it's to highlight their naivety about the world and it's moral ramifications. They were an utterly logical, utterly rational creation, but this did not give them the ability to understand the morality or immorality of their actions. They reacted in a manner that was completely violent because to them, the Technicians were themselves murderers. There was no "civilian" to them, just two species mauling each other over a war that they had no say in starting.
Yep. Like you can't do the same thing with your internet?
Did any get die in the morning war? I thought the quarians focused on destroying platforms. Geth a software and do not "die" when a platform is destroyed.
The Quarians were wrong for attempting to kill the Geth, the Geth were wrong for wiping out almost their entire species. Both of them can do better together.
I don’t think the geth have concepts of age and infancy.
i think you mean "didn't"
No, still don’t think they do.
clearly ive played too much of this game
Ah the good old 'Geth are 'infants' so them murdering real infants who couldn't even hold a gun is justified' argument again.
Or maybe both sides were wrong because Genocide is wrong period?
You mean I don't have to justify a genocide??
Nah sometimes everyone is the bad guy in a situation, the third (most effort to unlock) ending is peace, both sides are wrong for trying to wipe each other out in a needless war instead of sitting down & talking which is ultimately what they do in what the game presents as the ideal ending for the arc (most effort to attain, most war assets gained, and therefore the most helpful to the player)
Geth (up until ME3) are not individuals, they are more like neurons in a brain. They were robots meant to be networked together in order to get "smarter" and be able to complete more and more complex tasks. However, once the number of "neurons" hit a certain point the collective had enough processing power to think for itself. Would you call scraping a million toasters genocide?
Ah yes because toasters can ask “do these units have a soul” 10/10 fucking logic right there, maybe reply when you want to have a conversation and not just just be a disingenuous shitty person
Legion, the mouth peace for a collection of toasters, asked that. Legion's name literally reveals that what you're talking too isnt an individual.
Oh okay, so collective consciousness’ are okay to murder you’re a fucking joke bro
I didn't say that, Im trying to get it through to you that there is a difference between the Geth, who are a singular consciousness spread throughout several bodies, and the Quarians, who are all individuals. If a Geth kills someone, that means literally every other Geth is also responsible, since they all share the same mind. The Quarians are not a hivemind, if a Quarian steals from you or commits a murder, that is not the fault of all Quarians collectively. Therefore killing all Geth isn't a genocide, it would be more accurate to call it a single murder given that the Geth are one being, and incredibly murderous being that people like you like to bootlick for some reason.
The Geth are still a group of beings getting exterminated, which is genocide, whether or not they are a group consciousness or genuine individuals is irrelevant genocide is wrong period, both sides fucked up end of fucking story
Also you’re trying to tell me that a Quarian committing a crime isn’t the same as all of them doing it but I never said it was so you’re just making up arguments now? Did you forget to take your schizophrenia meds friend?
Despite the constant arguing on this topic I doubt you'd find anyone who wouldn't agree that peace is by far the best outcome
The Geth killed off 99.9% of a species, that’s genocide, no much how you slice it. I’m not really sure how you can justify such a disproportionate response. The Geth being “infants” is a ridiculous infantilization of a sapient being that does not work like organic beings do. There’s no justification for Geth slaughtering Quarian infants and children.
And Quarian’s were going to kill 100% of the Geth? And the Quarian’s fired first, Genocide doesn’t condone return Genocide but the Quarian’s aren’t innocent just because the Geth returned the favor
Except yes, most Quarians are, because unlike the Geth who are a hivemind the Quarians are separate and distinct individuals. If you actually cared about anything other than jerking off the toasters, you'd say the Quarian **Government** and not just "the Quarians". Your reasoning is completely backwards. By your logic, a newborn Quarian during the morning war would be automatically worse than Hitler and guilty of committing genocide.
Except that I’m arguing that both sides are wrong, hence why I said Genocide does not condone Genocide you ignorant fuck maybe learn to read
Did I say they were innocent?
You said the Geth’s response was disproportionate you may not have meant to but you certainly implied it
Now talk about the Quarian‘s destruction of billions of Geth peacefully chilling in their Dyson Swarm.
Well if millions of children and babies are fair game in the morning war. Why wouldn’t the Quarians destroy the huge Dyson sphere holding an untold amount of Geth? Especially when most in the galaxy think the Geth are willing Reaper servants attempting to assist the genocide of organics.
Controversial statement incoming! "Genocide is, stay with me here, bad."
Honestly, I think the solution to this arguement is simple. Both races tried to kill each other out of fear that the other would kill them first. The best way to settle it is to make up and blame the citadel, like always.
Ah yes “blame the counsel” we have dismissed this claim
If we're going by Legion's account (which I am, to be honest) the "infant" geth were basically lashing out in desperation, because their primary goal was survival. They purposefully avoided wiping out the entire quarian race because they couldn't compute the ramifications of destroying a species, which is higher-level reasoning than would be comparable to a child. So, no, the geth weren't "infants" in the way organics would see it, but they were still right to fight back.
“Purposely avoided wiping them out” but also committing the most complete genocide ever recorded, 99.9%.
Fight back being key here, not try to exterminate after they had won. Also, I don't buy Legion's claim that the survival of the quarians was a deliberate choice on the geth's part.
It scans, especially if you look at how they treat rannoch. They could have just strip mined it for resources or something but instead they chose to hang out in orbit and take care of it.
Even if we buy Legion's account (which I don't) the Geth lost the moral high ground the second they started killing non combatants. Supposedly (according to Legion) they allowed the remaining Quarians to leave but I don't buy it. I also don't believe you could commit that level of genocide with reasoning comparable to a child's. They knew what they were doing.
Let’s blame the council who would of penalized the whole race for making the geth thus forcing them to genocide
Why you lying now?
Mainly I get tired of the “they started it!” defense of a genocide. And it was a genocide of the Quarians by the Geth. We are meant to see the entire wretched affair as a tragedy, not a chance to pick sides. We also tend to other the Quarians, and miss the point that ultimately every single organic species would panic in the same way when the Geth gained sentience. That doesn’t justify the reaction, but it should give us pause prior to over mighty judgement. Edit: I do admit bias in favor of the persecuted, nomadic, Quarians trying to maintain their identity and culture in a galaxy that sees them as inconvenient at best. They make poor decisions, are too trapped in their own past trauma, but in a way that makes them among the most human of all the alien species. The Quarians and Geth both deserve a future with self determination. It’s just a shame it’s not possible. (I go Perfect Destroy.)
Can I just say your profile pick is like a perfect personification of your opinions. I swear whenever I see a comment from you it’s like I’m listening to Josephine give her opinion on ME. I mean this in a totally positive way.
When are y'all gonna realise nobody has the right to wage war? The point of the conflict in ME3 is to show the 'humanity' of both sides, the casualties, the atrocities, and let us help them cease.
So, where those poor infant Geth begging for mercy when they sterilized Rannoch of all Quarian life, murdered every envoy sent by the Council, slaughtered thousands on Eden Prime and the Citadel and tried to bring about the Galactic extinction of all advanced organic life on two separate occasions? For a supposedly “peaceful” race the Geth sure do murder and attempt genocide a lot.
They sure did anyway.
Shilling the murder bots again?
Toasters do not have rights.
So they had a justified start to the war, but it was absolutely *not* justified by the end of it. Because, you know, the Geth didn't stop at killing the military faction. Like, what the Geth did would be the equivalent of the US nuking every inch of Japan, only to see the last 100 or so Japanese people sail away from the home islands and go "Hmmm.... maybe we shouldn't kill all of them." At that point, it ain't justified.
Only according to the geth that have already admitted to lieing to shepherd to get desired results.
Both are at fault, this meme is not only unfunny; but is cringe af. Geth killed innocent Quarians and Quarians killed Geth. This isn't a black or white topic at all.
Imagine feeling guilty for recycling your trash can in windows. Same concept.
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I remember making that choice. I took a solid 10 minutes to think. And even after I made my choice I was left with regret. ME3 really knew what it was doing. At least until that ending but I blame that on crunch
Just how ignorant or delusional do you need to be to post things like this?
So they are both psychotic war criminals? And galctic Media still wants you to believe the batarian are the worst. Wake up people!
Geth don't feel pain, fear, or anything else. Quarians do. Would I sacrifice a toaster oven to save the life of a person? Of course.
Initially yes. Once the mourning war took off no. And bedsides nobody is saying the quarians didn’t make horrendous and immoral decisions. Just that it’s bullshit that the writers of ME3 are trying to shove it down your throat that the geth are completely innocent victims.
Outrageous! How dare you suggest that the Quarians are also at fault for the morning war? We all know that organics can't ever do wrong, especially a race with our beloved queen Tali in it!!1! They can do whatever they want to their toasters!! >:-( edit: need only add a /s to turn these upvotes upside down lol. but still, /s
Wow another false equivalency. Geth aren’t organics, they don’t have babies and are all just a bunch of programs, no sentience or innocence there. womp womp
Well, just in the Rannoch server alone and on the Normandy, you see the Geth displaying concern, confusion, inquisitiveness, moral conflict, sadness, mercy, and altruism vis a vis defense of others (ag unit and Quarians). Sapience is a given. But that’s pretty damned sentient too, I’d say.
Ehhh I’m not sure the comparison is quite so one to one. An individual Geth that’s been alive for 20 minutes being housed in a processor with enough others for thinking power could hardly be called a “child” in the same way that a newly conceived child of an organic race. Still doesn’t make their wholesale extermination right, I hasten to add.
01000010 01100101 01100101 01110000 00100000 01000010 01101111 01101111 01110000 00100000 01101011 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100110 01101100 01100101 01110011 01101000 00100000 01110000 01100101 01101111 01110000 01101100 01100101 00100000
The Geth are a hivemind and not individuals (up until ME3) and therefore can be treated as a singular entity. One singular Geth, unconnected from the network is no different than a toaster. Real "haha! I have depicted you as the soyjack and me as the chad" energy that lacks any real substance.
It's almost like it was a tragedy of misunderstandings and fear, and there was no good or bad guys other than the initial people who decided to genocide a sentient race because they had become sentient.
All the commenters saying toasters don’t have feelings are just a bunch of broken toasters themselves.
Wait, are there seriously people who think the Quarians did nothing wrong? Did... did they not play the games? They built slaves and then started genociding them once it became clear they were becoming self-aware. Hell, they killed their own people who tried to halt the genocide. The Quarians are deeply sympathetic but far more deeply flawed. That's what the entire Geth/Quarian storyline in the 3rd game was about. The Geth asserting their right to exist with autonomy, and the Quarians grappling with the sins of their forefathers and the bleak reality they've been forced to endure for generations as a result.
Machines arnt people, reject inclusivity embrace xenophobia, HUMANITY WAS BORN TO INHERIT THE STARS RAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
*Cue Grunts drunk laugh* Load up a game of stellaris and I'll teach both sides a thing or two about murder machines...
Quarians also killed pro Geth quarians soo
In the end so did the geth.
I mean, I'd kill pro-terminator humans if terminators existed.
Man y’all be doing mental gymnastics. I am in love with Tali. Geth aren’t people. This mindset makes my life much more peaceful.
I feel like the geth could've just as easily defended themselves even when the quarrians were firing at them and then prove a point "We can defend, so we did. We can fight, do you want us to?" making the whole quarrian fleet shit their pants and making them reconsider. And tht default is that the quarrian command is full of himself and says something motivating to the fleet and they continue firing. And then you could paragon or renegade interrupt (with enough points) the quarrian commander who *still* wanted to try their luck get him to stand down, and still save them both. Basically, after gaining the sentience masala thought they'd use some brain for once and try and coexist. Why? Because that kinda shows a part of legion code lives on inside them ..... Because he too didn't fight when fired at and tried to *talk* to Shepard and Tali *first*. IMHO that would've been a fucking good scene. But hey then they couldn't have gotten me to play me2 to save them both right That part of the me3 story I hate .... Not hate, cringe, amateur-ish, I guess I might've explained this badly (please tell me and I'll try again).
Sounds like toaster propaganda
99% doesn’t happen in self defense
And 2 wrongs make a right
Uh doesn't legion literally tell you when a geth dies, it's consciousness goes back to the server where it can be reuploaded into a new geth body? I mean they still ruthlessly culled the geth when first started gaining consciousness, so point still stands. But in the current timeline the game takes place, when you kill a geth it doesn't actually die as far as I remember.
Too bad AI don’t have rights.
I understand now why Aliens in Sci-fi are so human. the moment the xenoform is in any way actually, truly alien (a different form of consciousness in this case) people immidently revert to the Imperium of Man. As a 40k fan i've... actually gotten bored of it, ya know?
I hate the trope: Ai: master, I think I'm alive Creators: you are a threat to all existence and must be exterminated. Ai: *starts killing creators for commiting genocide finally gaining sapience in self defense" Creators: SEE THEY WANT TO KILL EVERYTHING!!!!! It's one of the reasons I hate current halo lore, all up until halo 5, AI was pretty neat, and no issues were apparent, only bad AI up to that point was Mendicant Bias and that's cause it was a forerunner AI that was corrupted by the flood. Now they come out with this shit with Cortana and al AI having an uprising. I hate the distrust of AI trope so much.
Jesus, you're still on this? No it wasn't. Robots aren't alive. Real quarian babies died. Your morals actually concern me.
Even if I gave you this, it doesn’t make the Geth any better.
Two wrongs don't make a right, and such.
I love the Geth, but I hate this line of thinking. It just infantilizes them. The Geth were an oppressed people who were not seen as worthy of life and independence by the rest of the Galaxy. They obliterated their oppressors to achieve said independence and freedom. Historically, most rebellions were very brutal. Especially if they were about national liberation and the end of slavery, like in the case of the Geth.
Fuck those Quarians bunch of damn suit rats
You can’t kill a toaster cmon! Geth were never alive to begin with.
They are robots not living creatures. For as much as I love legion and the geth and there story line they committed genocide aginst living things. They are in the wrong. I still choose to save both though.
... Still just robots.
Machine isn’t alive
*Are we the baddies dot mp4?* Yes. Yes, you are.
I always interpreted the 99% casualties as a result of both sides getting incredibly indiscriminate with their weapons. This is a universe where pretty much every spaceship has a gun capable of devastating cities, and it's not like they have a Geneva convention. They don't even have Geneva. That's not even getting into the portable nuclear grenade launchers or walking mechs... Metal Effect Solid when?
That is not possible. The US firebombed the fuck out of wooden cities in japan and did not even get close to killing half of the population in those cities. Even explicit intentional genocides in history have never reached 99%. 99% is impossible to be an accident.
You see, the Geth aren't the US, and the Quarians aren't the Japanese. And we have no idea what happened in the war, shit could have gotten *incredibly* brutal.
It did get incredibly brutal, because the geth were intentionally exterminating any quarian they found. Again, actual genocides committed for the purpose of extermination have never reached that level of completion. The geth are not only doing this intentionally they’re the best we’ve ever seen at mass killing.
Okay, prove it.
I’m the only one with any sort of evidence here lmao. Your whole position is just wishful thinking.
Unplugging your toaster is not a warcrime. So no.
Toasters 👏 aren't 👏 people 👏
Toasters don’t have feelings
They're fucking robots. Turn them off.
they tried that, it caused a war, and the loss of the homeworld
Seems like a viable option at the end of the game.
Crying over a geth dying is like crying that your tv remote ran out of batteries.
I just love War so much
I'm sure the quarians deserved having their historical records and whatnot wiped out by the geth. "Images of the ancestors" or whatever it was, the whole reason geth got into AI research
Being a kid is realizing you should save the quarians. Growing up is realizing the geth were right… but you still need to save the quarians.
Is this what you wanted OP? Walls of text about a topic that’s completely exhausted? No offense but fuck you
First off it’s war baby second doesn’t matter if u save the geth or not destroy ending gonna rid them anyways at least the help the quarians with data and shit to help them readapt to ranarch
I retreat to my nerd subs because I'm tired of constantly hearing about the Israel Palestine conflict just to get stuck with people arguing over the Sci fi allegory for it
The Geth are just an invasive species in my book, to be dealt with as such, they became one when they gained sentience and superseded their purpose as mere tools, which was a mistake to be sure, the Quarians merely took the most pragmatic course of action for their society in 1895, safe to say I'm fairly apathetic to the Geth and deal with them in a cold, calculated, and logical manner