Quote from: Xenomrph on Aug 09, 2015, 03:22:09 AM
Why not?
Because they're machines.
QuoteAlso I'm seriously bummed about no mass market edition on the horizon, that's an amazingly boneheaded move if they're seriously going to stick to it. If they think fans are going to just bite the bullet and pay $300 for the crazy edition, I think they're in for a rude awakening. It'd be way, way more profitable to sell a mass market edition for a reasonable price (source: the sum total history of publishing and marketing).
Same... Just for the cut-aways, alone, this is one of those rare examples of a book I'd genuinely love to own a copy of. There isn't any way to justify this price. They really are cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Quote from: Guan Thwei 1992 on Aug 09, 2015, 12:10:02 PM
Funny you should say that, because the main character of the novel "Sea of Sorrows", Alan Decker, feels exactly the same! 
He says how if you give Synthetics civil rights, you might as well give civil rights to a starship. Apparently, when Weyland-Yutani rose back to power, they "fixed" this little issue.
I vaguely remember this... Can recall readily agreeing with that logic.
Quote from: Corporal Hicks on Aug 09, 2015, 04:48:08 PM
How can it not? They're essentially alive and will want the rights that everyone around them do.
They'd only care about it if they're programmed to do so - and there's no reason for anyone to put in the immense time and effort necessary to do that. There'd be zero commercial incentive.
That's why I didn't understand a lot of the promotional materials surrounding David 8. It made a big deal about how the model was able to experience anger/sadness/whatever and all I could think of was why the hell you'd do that if you're creating it
specifically to undertake what would amount to slave labour.
Creating an
illusion of human behaviour (to help with crew cohesion) is a world apart from creating something which can literally experience it. The kind of things we've seen them being used for, they'd never need the capacity to experience actual emotions.
'
Terminator 2' had a great scene in this regard, where John Connor asked the Terminator if it cares about whether it completes its assigned objectives. In other words, whether it has any emotional
investment in the outcome. And it just says no... In the absence of contingencies, it would merely become obsolete for the rest of eternity.
That's
exactly how a machine would view itself. It wouldn't care or get sad or anything like that. All the stuff from David 8 about how he wanted his 'parents' dead, struck me as lazy writing for the sole purpose of trying to inject drama for drama's sake.
Even Bishop acts relatively emotionless, in regards to termination. He has a measure of self-preservation and comradeship, but tells Ripley to pull the plug because he'll never stand a chance of being top of the line, again.
