Finding Comfort in Death - A Cyberpunk 2077 Analysis
2 comments
its classic surface level sci fi that ignores any actual relevant ideas to focus on melodrama. just like how The Creator never really engaged with the actual debates around AI and what it means to be a person, instead just presenting 'black box' robot characters with undefined hardware and capabilities that already act exactly like humans, and treating them as a simple visual metaphor for racism and xenophobia. they don't engage with the ideas, they just present their half-baked unexamined assumptions with no further elaboration or engagement. cyberpunk 2077 is constantly telling you explicitly 'soulkiller kills you forever and makes a lifeless AI copy', and then puts you in control of the 'lifeless AI copy' and its exactly the same as when you control a human, they have the same memories and emotions as a human unlike the inscrutable deified AI version of Alt Cunningham which insists it is completely inhuman and not alive or conscious in the same way. the 'v lives' ending doesn't even subvert this at all, it simply involves making the AI that is killing you and taking over your brain an (apparently explicitly distinct and lifeless?) AI clone of V instead of Keanu Reeves. terms like 'AI' and 'soulkiller' and inane pontifications like keanu's 'mold on an orange peel' speech are thrown around for cheap melodrama with absolutely no examination of deeper meanings. it kinda makes sense in cyberpunk ig because V and Johnny both come across as kind of stupid.
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its classic surface level sci fi that ignores any actual relevant ideas to focus on melodrama. just like how The Creator never really engaged with the actual debates around AI and what it means to be a person, instead just presenting 'black box' robot characters with undefined hardware and capabilities that already act exactly like humans, and treating them as a simple visual metaphor for racism and xenophobia. they don't engage with the ideas, they just present their half-baked unexamined assumptions with no further elaboration or engagement. cyberpunk 2077 is constantly telling you explicitly 'soulkiller kills you forever and makes a lifeless AI copy', and then puts you in control of the 'lifeless AI copy' and its exactly the same as when you control a human, they have the same memories and emotions as a human unlike the inscrutable deified AI version of Alt Cunningham which insists it is completely inhuman and not alive or conscious in the same way. the 'v lives' ending doesn't even subvert this at all, it simply involves making the AI that is killing you and taking over your brain an (apparently explicitly distinct and lifeless?) AI clone of V instead of Keanu Reeves. terms like 'AI' and 'soulkiller' and inane pontifications like keanu's 'mold on an orange peel' speech are thrown around for cheap melodrama with absolutely no examination of deeper meanings. it kinda makes sense in cyberpunk ig because V and Johnny both come across as kind of stupid.