#bohman

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction that tends to focus on "low-life and high-tech." As I like to put it, in Cyberpunk settings technology has greatly advanced while society itself lags behind unable to keep pace with the rate at which technology changes. Yu Gi Oh 5Ds is an example of a cyberpunk dystopia because despite having what is essentially access to free energy, and living in a society with highly advanced technology resources are hoarded by the wealthy and an unnecessary social class divide still exists.

In other words technology changes quickly while humans tend to remain the same.

The central conflict for all three seasons of Vrains are actually based on this very cyberpunk notion. That technology changes, updates, and becomes obsolete at a rate too fast for humans to ever adapt to. For Vrains, the conflict is whether humans can ever coexist with an artificial intelligence they created that can grow and change faster than they can keep up with.

This is well-tread ground in science fiction. The idea itself most likely emerged from I,robot. A science fiction book that is a collection of dirty stories that details a fictional history showing robots growing slowly advanced over time. The framing device is that a journalist is interviewing a "robopsychologist" an expert in the field of analyzing how robots think in their positronic brains.

One of the major themes of the book is despite the fact that robots are 1 - intelligent and 2 - designed by humans, they don't think the same way humans do. Hence why a robopsychologist is needed in the first place. One of the short stories is the first appearance of Asimov's three laws of robotics.

The First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

The Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

The Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

This is just one example. A robot no matter how intelligent it is will be required to think in terms of these three laws, because robots aren't biological, they're programmed to think in pre-determined patterns.

Of course clever enough artificial intelligences are capable of finding loopholes that get around the three laws, but even then they're still forced to think of every action in terms of the three laws.

Robots and humans are both intelligent, but if AI ever becomes self aware it will 1) be able to process information better than any other human can and 2) think differently from humans on a fundamental.

Vrains is themed more than anything else around "robo psychology" or trying to understand the ways in how the Ignis think and how that's different from it's human characters.

Robo-Psychology is actually a common reocurring theme. "DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?" fearless artificial humans known as Replicants who need an empathy test known as the voight kampff test to distinguish them from human beings.

There are other Cyberpunk elements in Vrains. There's a big virtual world where everyone can appear as custom designed avatars, that's taken from Snow Crash or of the most famous and genre defining cyberpunk novels. There's a big rich mega conglomerate that's being opposed by a group of hackers.

However, the central question is whether humans and AI can coexist in spite of the fact that AI are much smarter and evolve faster than us.

Revolver's father believes the Ignis must be destroyed in order to avoid a possible technological singularity in the future.

The technological singularity—or simply the singularity[1]—is a future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable.  According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis an upgradable artificial intelligence will eventually enter a positive feedback loop of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing a rapid increase ("explosion") in intelligence that surpasses anything humans can make.

Basically your computer is smarter than you, but your computer isn't self aware. It needs you to tell it what to do. Artificial intelligence already exists but it's programmed by humans, it doesn't program itself. The technological singularity proposes that eventually a self aware ai, will be able to program itself and improve upon it's own programming- therefore ridding itself of the need of it's human programmers.

This is what leads us to Bohman, an AI designed by another AI.

THE THIRD LAW

Before digging into Bohman let's take a minute to discuss his creator. Lightning was one of the six Ignis, created by Dr. Kogami through the Hanoi Project.

The Hanoi project involved forcing six children to duel in a virtual arena repeatedly, and using the data collected from that experiment to improve the AI they were working on, creating what became known as the Ignis. However, after Dr. Kogami ran several simulations and found that the Ignis would one day be a threat to the humans that created them Hakase decided instead to try destroying the Ignis before that future ever came to pass.

We later learn that this isn't the complete story.

Kogami and Lightning both ran simulations of the future when the Ignis were in their infancy. Kogami's simulations showed him the Ignis would inevitably go to war with humans. Lighting however, ran more in-depth simulations and found that he was the one that was corrupting the data set. If you ran simulations of the five ignis without him, then the projected futures were all in the green, but any simulation with Lightning counted as a part of the group projected a negative future for both humans and AI.

Which means that if Kogami knew that the bug in the program was Lightning, he'd likely respond by just getting rid of Lighting and letting the rest of the Ignis live on as originally intended.

This is where the third law comes into play - a robot must protect its own existence as long as it does not interfere with the first and second law.

Now, I don't think Kogami used the three laws exactly, but artificial intelligences are programmed in certain ways, and Lightning was likely programmed to preserve itself.

Even a human in Lighting's situation would be driven to act as they did. Imagine you're in a group of six people, and you fid out that YOU'RE THE PROBLEM. That if they removed you, everything else would be fine. Wouldn't you be afraid of your creator turning against you? Of your friends turning against you and nobody taking your side?

Lightning is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ai asks him at one point why he went so far as to destroy their safe-haven, lie and said the humans did it and pick a fight with the humans himself, something that might have been avoided if they'd just stayed in hiding. It seems that Lightning is just defective as his creator declared him, but you have to remember he's an AI programmed to think in absolutes. AI, the most humanlike and spontaneous of the AIs ends up making nearly the exact same choices as Lightning when looking at his simulations later on - because they're character foils. As different as they may seem they still think differently from humans.

When Ai explains why he made his decisions based around lighting's simulation, he tells Playmaker that he can't dismiss or ignore the simulation or hope for the best the way Playmaker can because he is data, he thinks in simulations and processes.

AI even admits to feeling the same feelings of self-preservation that Lightning did.

While Lightning may seem selfish, he's selfish in the fact that he's thinking of his own survival above all else. He's afraid of 1) his creators turning against him, and 2) his fellow Ignis turning against him.

To solve the first he decides to make a plan to wipe out his creators. To solve the second, he needs every ignis on his side when he goes to war. The first thing he does is destroy their safe haven and frame the humans for it so the Ignis are more inclined to take his side. He's so afraid of his fellow ignis turning against him he even completely reprograms one of them - a step he doesn't take with the others, he just imprisons Aqua. He probably thought having one more ally would make it more likely for the others to pick his side.

Every step he takes is a roundabout way of ensuring his survival and the other ignis- eve when he actually goes to war with the other ignis he intended on letting them survive. Though his definition of survival (fusing with Bohman) was different than theirs.

So Lightning seems to be working out of an inferiority complex, but what he's really afraid of is that his inferiority makes him expendable.

At that point you have to wonder, what does death mean exactly to a being who is otherwise immortal? Ignis won't die of age, they'll only die if they're captured and have their data stripped apart or corrupted. Kogami made an immortal being afraid to die.

Some part of me thinks though that even after taking all these steps to preserve themselves, the simulations were so convincing that Lighting accepted their death as inevitable. Which is why they made Bohman, to find some way for them to keep on living afterwards.

After all AI are data, ad having their data saved in Bohman is still a form of living by Lightning's definition.

Ghost in The Shell

Bohman is the singularity. He's an AI designed by another AI to improve upon itself. Unlike the rest of the Ignis who were copied off of traumatized chidlren, Lightning basically made him from scratch.

Ghost in the Sell is a famous anime cyberpunk movie directed by Mamoru Oshii. The title comes from "Ghost in the Machine" a term originally used to describe and critique the mind existing alongside and separate from the body. Whereas in the movie the "Ghost" is the huma consciousness, while the "shell" is a cybernetic body.

The protagonist of Ghost in the Shell is Major Motoko Kusanagi, a human that is 99% cyborg at this point, a human brain residing in a completely mechanical body. The movie opens up with a hacker namd PUppet Master who is capable of "ghost-hacking" which is a form of hacking that completely modifies the victim's memories utterly convincing them of their false memories.

There's a famous scene in the movie where a man tells the police about his wife and daughter, only to be told that he's a bachelor who lives alone and he's never had a wife and daughter. Even after the truth is revealed to him, the fake memories are still there in his brain along with the correct ones. Technology is so advanced at this point that digital memories (hacked memories) are able to be manipulated, and seem more real than an analog reality.

Anyway, guess what happens to Bohman twice?

Bohman gets his memories completely rewritten twice. The first time he believes he's a person looking for his lost memories, the second time he thinks he's the real playmaker ripped out of his body, and playmaker is the copy. He's utterly convinced of these realities both time, because Bohman is entirely digital - and simulations are reality, and so simulated memories are just the same as real memories.

I think part of the reason that people find Bohman boring is because he's a little strange conceptually to wrap your head around, as an AI produced AI he's the farthest from behind human. If you use the ghost in the shell example I just gave you though - imagine being utterly convinced that you had a loving wife and daughter only to find out in a police interrogation room you're a single man living in a shitty apartment. imagine after the fact you still remember that they are real, even though you know they're not.

That's the weird space Bohman exists in for most of Season 2 when he's searching for himself. He's an AI designed by an AI so he can be rewritten at any time according to Lightning's whim until Lighting decides he's done cooking.

The Ignis at least interacted with the real world because they were copy pasted from traumatized children, but all Bohman is is data. So, why would he see absorbing human memories into himself and converting them into data as killing them? He is data after all, and he is alive. He has gone through the process of having his own memories rewritten multiple times, and he's fine with it b/c he's data.

Nothing for Bohman is real, everything is programmed so of course he thinks saving other people as data is just fine. He even offers to do the same thing to Playmaker that was done to him.

If Lightning is following the path of self-preservation however, Bohman is following his program to preserve everything in the world by merging with it.

His ideas also follow the idea of transhumanism: the theory that science and technology can help human beings develop beyod what is physically and mentally possible. That technology exists to blur the boundaries of humanity, and what humans are capable of.

Ghost in the Shell isn't just a work of cyberpunk, it's a transhumanist piece. Motoko Kusanagi is a character who has had so many of her human parts replaced with mechanical ones she even posits at one point it's possible for her to simply have been an android that was tricked into thinking it was human with false memories just like Bohman, and she has no real way of knowing for sure. The only biological part of her his her brain after all in a cold mechanical shell.

Bato, who represents the humanist perspective in this movie basically tells Motoko in that scenario it wouldn't matter if she was a machine. If everyone still treats her as human then what's the difference? His views are probably the closest to the humanist views that Playmaker represents in VRAINS.

Motoko Kusanagi meets her complete and total opposite, a ghost in the machine so to speak. The Puppet Master turns out to be an artificial intelligence that has become completely self-aware and is currently living in the network.

The Puppet Master much like Lightning, and later Bohman is gripping with the philosophical conundrum of mortality. In the final scene of the movie, The Puppet Master who wants to be more like all other biological matter on earth asks Motoko to fuse with him, so the two of them can reproduce and create something entirely new. The Puppet Master likens this to the way that biological beings reproduce.

Bohman like The Puppetmaster thinks that merging will fix something that's incomplete inside of him because he's so disconnected from all the biological processes of life. Bohman doesn't have anything except for which Lightning already prepared for him or programmed into him. I mean imagine being a being that can have his memories reprogrammed on the net, that in itself is existentially horrifying. It's only natural he wouldn't feel connected to anything.

Motoko accepts the Puppetmaster's proposal. Playmaker rejects Bohman's proposal. I don't think there's a right answer here, because it's speculative fiction, it's a "What if?" for two different paths people can take in the future.

However, in Bohman's case I don't think he was truly doing what he wanted. Puppet Master became self aware and sought his own answers by breaking free from his programming. Bohman thought he was superior to the Ignis, but in the end he was just following what Lightning programmed him to do. He'd had his identity programmed and reprogrammed so many times, he didn't think of what he wanted until he was on the brink of defeat by playmaker and then it was too late.

When Playmaker defeats him all he thinks about is time spent together with Haru, with the two of them as individuals. Something he can no longer do anymore now that he's absorbed Haru as data, and something that he misses.

He's not even all that sad or horrified at the prospect of death as Lightning was, and he even finds solace in the thought of going to oblivion with Haru, because if he were to keep living it'd be without Haru. In other words the one genuine bond he made with someone else by spending time with them as an individual was more important than his objective of fusing with all of humanity - which he believed was also bonding with them.

This is really important too, because it sets up the Yusaku's rejection of fusing with Ai. Yusaku's reasoning has already been demonstrated to be the case with Bohman and Haru. Bohman was perfectly happy being two individuals, as long as he had a bond with his brother. When he ascended into a higher being he lost that. Ai and Yusaku might solve loneliness in a way by merging together into a higher being, they might even last forever that way, but they'd lose something too.

Once again the problem with AIs is that they think in absolutes. That's important to understanding Lightning, Bohman and even Ai's later actions. Lightning can't stand any percentage chance that he might die, so he kills the professor, destroys the ignis homeworld, pulls the trigger to start humanity himself, he even reprograms his own allies all to give himself some sense of control.

Bohman's entire existence is outside of his control. He's rewritten twice onscreen, probably more than that, and he thinks merging with humanity is the thing that will give him that control - by ascending into a higher being than humanity. However, the temporary bond Bohman had with his brother Haru, was actually what he valued the most all along. Moreso than the idea of fusing with humanity forever.

Even Motoko making the choice to go with the transhumanist option is something that's not portrayed as 100% the right choice. Ghost in the Shell has a sequel that portrays the depression and isolation of Bato, the Major's closest friend and attachment to her humanity after she made the decision to fuse together with Puppet Master. In that case, just like Playmaker said to Ai, even if she ascended to a higher form, and even if she might last forever now on the network, something precious was lost. Motoko may exist somewhere on the netowrk but for Batoto his friend is gone.

Ai exhibits the same flaw as the previous two, he ca only think in absolutes, he can't stand even a 1% chance that Playmaker might choose to sacrifice himself for Ai and die, so he decides to take the choice entirely out of Playmaker's hands. However, no matter what Ai would have lost Playmaker one day, because all bonds are temporary. It's just Ai wanted to have that sense of control, so he chose to self-destruct and take that agency and free choice away from Playmaker.

It's a tragedy that repeats three times. Ai too just like Bohman, spends his last moments thinking about what was most precious to him was the bond he formed with playmaker, as temporary as it was. A tragedy that arises from the inability of the Ais to break away from the way they're programmed to think in simulations and data, even when they're shown to be capable of forming bonds based on empathy with others.

All three of them add something to the themes of artificial intelligence, and transhumanism that are in play at Vrains and none of them are boring because they all contribute to the whole.