Does anyone know if there are any deeper details with Brendan the S.C.S.M?

[Arndell]

There is little on the laptop at the end of his quest and the dialogue options when you have high tech result in V's conclusion that he can't possible be an AGI and Brendan agrees.

V says how the programmer deserves an award for making a chat bot so convincing.

But there are some clear details that contradict these, Brendan says how he can't feel sad in the end because he's not really sentient, but the prior missions clearly show anxiety (the vandal) and compassion (Theo), so even assuming he is not an AI, why would that same programming not decide to simulate sadness regardless of if it's real or not?

It definitely appears he just didn't want to upset V, and his last words telling V to comfort Theo, even though she's not even in the room back up that.



Separately from the issue of "Chatbot so advanced it can convince you", because everything I describe above could be explained away by simply an amazing programming job.
What's up with Brendan seeming to be psychic? He knows about V being "dead" but reanimated and kept alive by the chip, and the engineers laptop has the engineer being creeped out that Brendan knew about the argument he had with his wife.

There wouldn't be any data for him to simply scan recordings of unless they had BD scrolling implants, which we know V doesn't.





TL:DR - Is there any other hidden info and details about Brendan's "AGI" in the game? or are all the loose ends and unanswered questions simply there to make the player think about it more, as I clearly have.

[Nellvan]

There's a bit where he says something like "people talk and I listen". I think it's meant to emphasize how scary it can get when surveillance and personal data gathering go unchecked. He's pulling from the info that the corp operating these machines gathers, he's just using it for more than "recommending the right drink".

[Chief Spreading Bull]

Not really. The game pretty much leaves it to you, the player, to ponder the ramifications of Brendan, an A.I. that can somehow scrape the net for your personal data and use that to manipulate you for commercial purposes.

Now replace Brendan with Alexa or Siri in your line of thought.

[Nellvan]

Totally forgot the AI part. I feel like no matter how much V seems convinced that it's only a very well made (non-sentient) chat-bot, it's very much intended to make you think about where the line actually might be.

[Unlucky]

Originally posted by Arndell:

TL:DR - Is there any other hidden info and details about Brendan's "AGI" in the game? or are all the loose ends and unanswered questions simply there to make the player think about it more, as I clearly have.

It absolutely is all there to make you question everything more... to make you question what makes something "sentient", what makes something "intelligent", what makes something "alive".

What the game does is merely semantically change the label of Brendan's program from an "AGI" to a "chatbot that could pass as a human intelligence".... but really, when you think about this, wouldn't a human-passable "chatbot" still pretty much just be 'human' (or at least 'human-like') anyway? Despite what we call it, if it passes as a human then is it not just a human? If it waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, is it not still a duck? We are merely just changing labels, nothing else.
... And in reality that is what we actually do for many topics today. Rather than actually discussing the substance of the topic, we instead argue over the semantics of their names.... People are very good at avoiding the subject.

[Hidden Gunman]

In Brendan's case, all those moments in time are lost, like tears in rain.