I haven’t been paying very close attention to that whole thing lately– as I’ve said multiple times, I care about Disney’s latest “canon” significantly less than I care about most fan writers’ latest fics.

But, despite being very much not a go-to person to talk about the Ares movie, I have now gotten a few asks regarding the use of rezzed-out programs as soldiers in the military. Which, yeah, is what appears to be happening in the trailer.

Are they intended as US military soldiers? Do they break control and start attacking the US military instead of the enemy? Is that what’s supposed to be happening here? I have not been watching any of this closely enough to say.

I can imagine that this use of programs would have a few (reasonable-seeming, on the surface) motivations:

-replace human soldiers and thus take humans out of harm’s way

-programs that die can be replaced with duplicates that have all the same knowledge and do not need to be trained like human reinforcements

-probably can be programmed with reflexes, strength and resiliency exceeding that of humans

-follow orders without fail, avoiding any problems that arise from human misinterpretation or disagreement with orders

But, going by the usual cliched tropes for this kind of story (which I don’t expect for a minute that Disney will innovate on at all)…. I figure that last one is where things go wrong.

Humans will grasp what their boss is trying to say, even if the phrasing is word-salad. And humans will follow those instructions if they think it means keeping their job, even if they know the instructions are stupid or unethical or fucking illegal, as long as they don’t think that’s their problem.

Perfect rule-following AIs might refuse to follow rules that are internally inconsistent, or that violate higher-up rules. The mutiny probably stems from a too-literal interpretation of something.

Clu all over again, basically. Yawn.