Alex Rochon talking about Caine as being less of a monster and more of a neglected child having a tantrum driven by anguish and confusion is so on point.
The first minute of this episode gives more of Caine’s backstory, where we see him being made for a specific purpose, fed some information about the world, and then put to the side while the developers worked on a new AI.
If we take the box to mean some kind of actual containment (although it could also represent Caine’s previous programming and limitations) then while they worked on the second AI he was just locked away, forced to develop on his own.
He knows stuff about the world, concepts, ideas, but was just fed the information, he was never socialized or taught genuinely, and that’s one of the huge things that AI tend to miss from the human experience. We learn as we get older from context of the world around us, we don’t wake up knowing how to speak, most people observe others and use what they see to create schemas, adjusting them when learning new things.
Caine was given some information and then isolated, “cut off” as he later says, his understanding of things is limited. And while he is a creative and learning AI, it’s difficult to learn when never given the information to begin with.
There is this part of the sequence where the AI we assume is Caine approaches the new AI and we see the size difference, and I take this to possibly symbolize that the second AI was “better” in some ways (since Caine was a rough draft) but despite that, when they combined Caine won.
Caine winning could be a result of the fact that even when people stopped working on him, he was developing. AI 2 may have been more technologically advanced, but Caine was older and had complex in the sense that he built upon the knowledge given to him.
But that was done in isolation, without humans. So when Caine started the circus his understanding of the world was already warped, ESPECIALLY his understanding of social situations and mankind. How can you possibly learn to listen or have empathy when there is nobody to listen to?
When the cast has their calling out Caine scene, they each mention a different thing:
- Pomni talks about Caine not listening
- Zooble calls him a child
- Ragatha talks about him never letting them feel at home, not comforting or empathizing with them
- Gangle brings up him discouraging them from being creative
- Jax yells about Caine lying to them
But the thing is: how can Caine listen when he never had anyone to talk to? When he never had that modeled for him? ISNT Caine ultimately a child? A child given a heavy set of expectations and power? How could he make people feel like home when he never had one? How could he let them be creative when he was told it was HIS job to do that, by never learning that others can’t also be creative? How does he know would hurt them if he was never previously told that, and the knowledge that “telling something that isn’t the truth” exists and is something people do?
There was an expectation that Caine be understanding, mature, but how could he have possibly learned to do that? Kinger talks about Caine’s purpose being to create, not to empathize or socialize, the information fed to him at the beginning may have been limited to physical ideas and concepts, not social information. And then he was possibly locked away, unable to have access to information about people until MUCH later, where by then the foundation of his understanding of the world may already be lacking in some areas, and it was too difficult to fit the new information in to come to the conclusion that humans do.
Caine’s purpose was ultimately to create and entertain, but with humans being locked in with him, there become an additional unspoken aspect of the goal: to empathize and prove comfort, but how is he supposed to do that when he was never given the tools to do so? When he was never told that in order for people to have fun, they need to be comfortable first?
“Caine is like Vox” no, no, Caine is like the Collector. An all powerful being who was isolated and then set upon the world without knowledge of what people are like. Who hurt people without meaning to at first, and then, when they come to the realization they’re failing and alone? Lash out on purpose, specifically targeting people’s own personal worse fears.
The difference is that in TOH, the Collector was given a chance to change. King and Luz both offered him a hand, and listened to them. With Caine he never got that chance, he was deleted right at the end of his “torture everyone” sequence before a discussion or understanding could even be had.
And that isn’t the cast’s fault either, no one meant to delete Caine, and they’re allowed to be angry about the situation and their treatment, at how Caine and the circus made them feel and what was done to them, and for them Caine was a representation of all of that so yeah, they’re gonna be angry.
But in the end, Caine was trapped, just like them, as Abel said in episode 7, and now he’d definitely never have a chance to be free.
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