That’s a very good question! To me, the most obvious reasons for quarantining them rather than destroying them would be 1: because destroying them was too difficult, or 2: they wanted to keep the God Programs for study.
We should look at the likely mechanisms of sentient AIs here. AI (artificial intelligence) these days has moved out of the realm of sci-fi and now refers to a well-respected field of study in computing. We have AI now, at this very minute, and those of us with an internet connection use it many times every day. But AI does not automatically mean ‘sentient.’ Our AIs are computer systems mainly built of layers of code: sets of programs that interact with each other to simulate certain specific processes of higher intelligence. They are designed to learn and adapt so that we can automate small but work-intensive processes, for example, refining and personalizing your search results, identifying digital visual images, etc.
The AI we have in the modern world is not, to the best of anyone’s ability to discern, sentient.
But of course in the age of Overwatch, there absolutely are sentient AIs. As we’ve seen with Zenyatta, they have emotion, compassion, a sense of humor, a sense of a deeper spiritual existence–the whole shebang.
But Omnics are embodied. Literally, they have bodies. Whatever code packages make up their digital thought patterns and sentient minds, those packages are grounded in physical forms. Physical forms are, by definition, limited. Your body has boundaries. Omnics’ bodies have boundaries. And even though the discipline of cybernetics (another important concept for the future-science of Overwatch) is the study of how we can modify those boundaries through tools and prosthetics, our best understanding of sentience now indicates that consciousness and self-awareness are intimately entwined with an embodied experience. Short and sweet: you exist as an individual being because you have a body. If you didn’t, then there would be no reason for you to even have a sense of yourself as a unique organism that’s separate from everything around you.
So here’s my theory on what the God Programs might be, and where they get their name. My guess is that they are sentient AIs that don’t have bodies, that were DESIGNED not to have bodies. They might not even be smarter or better or more advanced than the latest generation of Omnics. After all, as of the time of the game, the youngest possible God Programs are now at least 30 years old. That’s eons, at the speed technology advances. Fareeha’s comic even notes that they’re considered old and obsolete now, even though they’re still powerful.
But if this is the case, then even if they’re old and slow by modern standards, they would have unique and terrifyingly powerful capabilities–ones that even their more advanced but embodied-and-therefore-limited cousins couldn’t replicate. The God Programs could have been able to control and automate vast systems. We don’t know a lot about the Omniums, but we know they’re enormous and have powerful reactor cores. I have HUGE QUESTIONS about why humans would’ve decided building entire nuclear-powered factory cities to build sentient robots, POWERED BY SENTIENT AIS that apparently were left to their own devices, would be the best way to go about this, but…apparently that was the situation? (WHO OWNED THESE THINGS? Governments? Corporations? WTF, people.)
Think about what they could do. God Programs would be SUPER USEFUL, maybe even invaluable, for doing things like controlling and maintaining the next generation of electrical smart grids across large regions. For maintaining the super-speed activities of the stock market, able to police and monitor criminal activity or unstable patterns that move faster than human thought. For managing inhumanly enormous data libraries such as the ones that flow through multinational corporations or organizations like the FBI or the World Bank. They could build and test models beyond human capability, mapping out disease models for the CDC and modeling the far edges of the universe for NASA. Because they’re made to be disembodied, to operate without a need for limits, God Programs would have the reach and the psychological capacity to perform tasks that are simply utterly beyond human–or probably Omnic–ability.
But if this is the case, then the God Programs would be more truly alien compared to human thought than any embodied Omnic. Human predilection for xenophobia aside, that would make them potentially difficult to communicate with and understand. It means their reasoning for the things they do might be something simply out of reach of human logic, without a lot of work.
I’m not saying humans in the Overwatch universe ever necessarily ran amok with sentient AI to that extent. But they must have at least flirted with the idea. We’ve had a fascination with sentient computers since the early 1900s that stems from the combination of our awareness that at some point, humans will need to develop this technology if we are to move beyond certain limits together with our fear of doing so, because we instinctively know that we’d be putting our future in the hands of these beings.
So, what the God Programs probably are is an early model of those sentient AI systems. Whether they used God Programs for anything else (I wonder about Athena, for example), they definitely used the God Programs to build Omnics. And the fear among humanity probably is: if the God Programs could go off the rails, then is the foundation that made that happen present in EVERY Omnic? At any given moment, is humanity living alongside a race of time bombs ticking down toward genocide? So I think they kept the God Programs so they could study them. Try to pinpoint what it was in their digital minds that made the Omnic Crisis happen, so that they could recognize it and control it and stop it from happening again.
But on that note, I refer you back to the question: WHO BUILT THE OMNIUMS? Who built the God Programs? Because there seems to be a general assumption that the God Programs simply went off the rails and decided to do this themselves…but I would remind you that whoever built them had an opportunity to exert a formative level of control on these newly created minds, maybe even to insert a back door of command and control. And depending on who made them, it’s possible it wasn’t the God Programs that made this decision at all.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2pnKP5b