About Evelyn’s decision (ending spoilers)

[dogdennings]

Who did you side with?

I decided to side with no one. I came very close to siding with Soren, but he acted so creepy during my final encounter with him that I just couldn’t do it. I wanted so badly for him to grow as a character and improve himself. He seemed to understand that his behavior was neither healthy nor appropriate, but he still ends up getting drunk and hitting on the main character. I sympathize with him, but I didn’t want to work for him.

If I play the game again, I think I will side with Nora and try to spend more time with her.

[jaderpansen]

Nora. No regrets.

[crimsonlea]

I chose Nora on my first playthrough. On my second, I chose no one and went out on my own. As much as I love the Nora ending, I feel like choosing no one actually fit Evelyn's character better. It felt like the natural progression for her, especially since she has unresolved issues with her family, and being an Eliza proxy would make her realize that she needs to finally address those. I also liked the conversation with Erlend before she left. It seemed like she would still be keeping in touch and keeping tabs on Eliza from afar while dealing with her own personal stuff and healing from everything that happened.

[Oyajuu]

The question I asked myself was, after siding with everyone, which outcome I liked most.
Surprisingly, Rainer.

[JohnnyTheWolf]

I visited Nora, since she was kind and also right about Skandha, but I ultimately decided to continue working as a proxy until I could become a licensed counselor. While I liked Nora, I did not particularly care about her weird art projects - an open-source version of Eliza sounded interesting, but the choice did not seem to suggest that Evelyn would pursue that path had I picked Nora's ending - and deviating from Eliza's script led to some satisfying results, so pursuing a career as a proper counselor felt like a natural thing to do.

I am a bit afraid of replaying this game, though, as I tried to play Evelyn as close as I am myself in real life, obliging yet reserved and ambivalent. I also wonder if I would feel comfortable siding with a pitiful creeper like Soren or a smug pompous narcissist like Rainer.

[ian]

I also picked Nora, because rekindling a relationship with an old friend seemed like a good idea, and working for either of the maniacs in any capacity seemed like a really bad idea.

As an aside, I loved the yawning gulf between Rainer's image of Eliza as the seed of an AI revolution, and the reality of it as a mediocre chat bot run by an inexperienced kid who's never bothered to actually use it. This absolutely matches my experience of the tech industry.

I do wish we could see the stats on people's choices though - other Zachtronics games as well as other narrative-choice games typically have that. I think the game leans very heavily in one direction but I'm not sure.

[JohnnyTheWolf]

Originally posted by ian:

As an aside, I loved the yawning gulf between Rainer's image of Eliza as the seed of an AI revolution, and the reality of it as a mediocre chat bot run by an inexperienced kid who's never bothered to actually use it. This absolutely matches my experience of the tech industry.

Tell me more...

[Corporal Ham]

I'm not the guy above, but a huge portion of modern AI stuff is BS. It's one of the big silicon valley lies that really gets under my skin.

Artificial intelligence is more a brand than it is an actual tool used in technology. Many of the major software companies try to make their machine learning-based services seem almost human, with names like Alexa and Watson. They want you to believe there is this unified, near general intelligence behind the speaker, when it's really just a set of specialized programs all working in concert.

You can look at a tweet from Elon Musk to get a sense of where the 'AI' brand claims to be at (on the cusp of general intelligence, soon to vastly exceed humanity), but the reality is that machine learning tools are nowhere close to that, both in terms of the hardware that would be necessary to create such an intelligence and the software that could actually behave like a human given the hardware. It will be many decades, minimum, before we see anything resembling general intelligence, and it's just as likely that we won't see it anywhere near our lifetimes.

And the idea that the moment AI's reach human intelligence they will suddenly enhance themselves in a convergence-like event is dubious. The improvements in hardware that have enabled modern machine learning can only come from labor and resources that do not exponentially grow. My biggest doubt about AI's future is that computer hardware isn't improving at the rate it used to. We may not ever get the hardware for a general intelligence, and I'm suspicious of the idea that some AI-god will be able to magically reinstate Moore's Law.

Never take any talk of AI in our culture at face-value. It's part of a techno-utopian narrative whose primary purpose is to paper over all the deeper structural problems in our country by claiming that technology will either fix all our societal ills or completely eclipse them. You can see a bit of that in Soren's story. Machine learning technology is truly amazing, and will enable all kinds of interesting and exciting discoveries in the future, but it will not be the world-shaking existential threat in the way that someone like Rainer or Elon Musk would have you believe.

[JohnnyTheWolf]

Yeah, I did get a strong Elon Musk vibe from Rainer, which is why I am reluctant to have Evelyn sympathise with him. The guy is undeniably suave and charismatic, but at the same time, his smugness and pretentiousness make him just so insufferable.

[ian]

I didn't mean anything specific to AI. All the characters in this game feel really familiar to me, resembling folks I've worked with or met. There're plenty of tech executives with a hugely grandiose idea of what they're building, even if it's really just some small, untested thing which may or may not actually be able to do its most basic job. That's Rainer and Soren. Get down to who's doing the actual work, and all too often it's people just like Erlend, well-intentioned but uninformed.

Eliza takes it to the level of satire, but that just helps drive the point home.

Might as well have been ripped from the headlines:

Rainer: We take data privacy VERY seriously!
Also Rainer: Here's access to Soren's data.
Rainer's company: We gave your data to a third party and it got stolen. Sorry!

[Lucifer]

Nora. Also no regrets.

[Phobian]

I chose Rainer, not because I fully agree with his vision but because I wanted to adjust his vision to better help people. I was very close to siding with Rae and becoming a counsellor though, but in the end I thought I'd help more people by making Eliza have better, more practical advice and solutions than doing one-on-one counselling.

I thought Soren's tech could be a good aid to people in extremes of emotion but was a straight up dystopia if everyone was using it all the time, as in his ending. Negative emotions help us avoid certain actions that harm others and ourselves - in the hands of someone responsible it's amazing technology but Soren is anything but responsible.

[n0bra1ner]

Spent the evening with Nora, but in the end I felt like leaving it all behind was the natural choice.
- I (Evelyn) am not a rebell like Nora, nor am I an artist or rockstar. That life is great for her, but won't work for me.
- Rae... is so convinced of Eliza, so that she even takes a critical aricle personal. I'm not sure what an ongoing career as a proxy could have given me, considering the doubts I already had with all of this.
- I sympathized with Soren, though he is kind of a creep. ;) But I wondered if dreaming the reality away can really be the solution. It might be similar to what Maja thought of that meadow-lands-game: afterwards (/when you wake up) your life is still as ♥♥♥♥♥♥ as it was before. So I didn't really believe in that.
- I was a little curious where Rainer would take this whole thing with Eliza and the AI. Would have been interesting ho it all turned out. But in the end he is not a good guy, his aim is not to help people, but to gain power - and that wasn't of any importance to me. Also, the way he handled Soren's personal data showed how little morals ment to him.

So, loneliness it was agian... But I loved the positivity of Evelyn in the end.

[Knightly Knave]

Originally posted by Phobian:

I chose Rainer, not because I fully agree with his vision but because I wanted to adjust his vision to better help people. I was very close to siding with Rae and becoming a counsellor though, but in the end I thought I'd help more people by making Eliza have better, more practical advice and solutions than doing one-on-one counselling.

I thought Soren's tech could be a good aid to people in extremes of emotion but was a straight up dystopia if everyone was using it all the time, as in his ending. Negative emotions help us avoid certain actions that harm others and ourselves - in the hands of someone responsible it's amazing technology but Soren is anything but responsible.

Same with me! I chose Rainer because I wanted to turn Eliza into something that wasn't a chatbot that could actually help people like you do when you go off book in that one chapter. It doesn't really seem to necessarily end that way though. . .

[Hero Piggy]

I chose Nora on my first playthrough because I felt that would be the happiest ending, being able to escape from the burdens of having to make decisions about the technology, and being free to do something fun.

My least favourite ending was the one with Rainer. It felt cold, corporate, and all the focus was on advancing the technology. It seemed to me that Evelyn's character had the most drastic change in that ending, and it was questionable who was really benefiting from the technology ultimately.

[Camui Kushi]

First play through, chose Reiner. He was right; whether Evelyn was on board or not, Eliza was going to keep developing. Might as well be a part of it and make sure it’s done right. The ending is a bit of a downer, but none of the other options felt right. Running away was second most reasonable, in my eyes.