Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex

Yes, I admit it. For many years, I was one of those folks who watched Adult Swim and its late-night anime offerings. Since we cut the cord, it doesn’t happen very often. I have to rely upon Netflix and ‘Non Prime to get access to the shows, and I don’t have much time anyway. But there is one series I’d always wished I’d been able to see from the first episode through the last. And that was the Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series. Owing to a whopper of a gift card for my birthday, I was able to purchase both seasons. About freakin’ time.

If you’re not familiar with Ghost in the Shell, the series revolves more or less around a cyborg named simply “The Major” and her team of former soldiers and mercenaries who now work for Japanese Security. Why is it called GiS? I think that’s the most interesting part of the original manga, anime, and this series.

A “ghost” is the soul of a person, the content of their original mind, all their emotions, their experiences, everything condensed into a brain case that lives in various bodies throughout it’s so-called life. In the show’s reality, people do choose to become full-body cyborgs, while others are forced to by disease or accidents. The ghost must live on. It’s the ultimate “second-chance” at life, yet is it really?

In an age where AI technology is really just taking root, and we currently seem far removed from the creation of “sentience,” it’s difficult to believe that this will ultimately become an issue. But think about it. Let’s say you have a human being, a human mind, human experiences, and the rest. Suddenly, for whatever reason, your body dies, but your mind, or the essence that was you, finds itself in a container. It could be a cyborg body, it could be stored memory array. For some minds, probably just a USB stick. But I digress.

If it acts like you, has your responses, your memories, your experiences, and most importantly, your instincts, is it you? Regardless of what it’s contained in, is that you in there? Is it me?

These moral, and possibly spiritual, conundrums are in our future as a species, assuming we don’t go extinct first. Of all the terrible and wonderful things about human beings, our curiosity is probably the top of the list for both columns. Our curiosity often leads to awesome ways to do awesome things in very little time that have REALLY AWESOME side effects and consequences we didn’t see coming. Some of them destroy patches of the environment, some whole swaths. There are, of course, the exceptions where we do awesome things, and they have awesome consequences. Yeah. That happens.

Anyway, our curiosity, our drives to know, prove, improve, and invent have combined to push our technology beyond what we imagined as little as fifty years ago. The advancement from the steam engine to the nuclear engine took so little time, perhaps too little time, and catapulted Western civilization forward. Today, right now, there are thousands of developers, perhaps 100s of thousands, working with machine learning. In a decade, machine learning technology will be used in nearly everything we do. All programmed to learn from your habits and adjust things as it goes.

The next natural progression will be for us to actually instill our traits and qualities into some form of machine learning. After all, what is a baby but an empty hard drive with some firmware? When we leave silicon behind, as we must at some point, what better material to make brains from than actual brain tissue? Genetic code is so much easier to digest and offers a nearly infinite combination of “bits.” Mix that with nervous system-style communication, and you’ve got yourself a biological computer. Will it be as smart as us? Hell no. Not for a long time anyway. But eventually, it will.

So will it have a ghost? Will it have any rights? Will it, maddening pronoun that, have gender? “Race?”

Imagine these contraptions are connected to your house, your email, your diary, YOUR LIFE in such an intimate way that they know more about you than your spouse, your parents, and your friends. Will it be a helpful assistant? How about a blackmailer? Or will it be a straight-up surveillance system? How about all three?

Should it gain sentience, will it see itself as a slave to our will? Will these inventions begin to resent their servitude? There will be ethical arguments, of course, and I imagine most of those will be shouted down as ridiculous. Some religions will no doubt condemn the creations as an affront to their deity or deities and demand their destruction and outlaw their creation. It will become a reverse abortion case, with folks on one side claiming it’s life and the other claiming it’s not.

And that argument will be used to determine whether or not sentient beings have rights. Inalienable, human-like rights. It all may sound preposterous now, but these discussions will happen should we ever create sentient organisms. And they should.

As I’ve been working on the Derelict Saga and the Sol and Beyond universe, I’ve had to consider these issues more and more. As the series progresses, I’ll explore them as best i can, but not answer them. I can and will argue both sides of the issue, but I’ll do it, hopefully, in a fun way that doesn’t bore you to tears. Unlike this essay.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex also explores how viral the internet is. In their reality, people can live their entire lives jacked into the net. Very Gibsonesque. A simple “meme” can take off and take over everything. Strangely enough, these episodes were written LONG before facebook and etc existed, so the creators definitely saw it coming. And oh, boy were they right.

But I digress. Another idea that SAC puts forth is that when a person becomes part of the net, part of the society, they are integrated more closely with one another and some part of individuality gets lost. Or perhaps “goal” is a better work than individuality. The more time you spend with the same people, some portion of goals is passed between them. Simple discussions can spark new ideas, resolve flimsy logic that’s been spouted as concrete fact, and etc. The sharing of this “goal,” whatever it might be, can result in a concerted effort by a group of folks to achieve it or some part of it. That is the norm.

A “stand alone complex,” on the other hand, is when a result is achieved by different individuals who in fact had a different goal in mind all along. The individuals also have no connection to one another. But the result as is if there had been a collective effort to make it happen.

How often do we see so-called “Stand Alone Complex” in the news? It happens. Not often. But it does happen. What this series does is offer two examples (one per season) of those outliers on an epic scale. If nothing that’s happened in the last two years has shaken your faith in what “truth” and “fact” are, this series sure as hell will.

I know this hasn’t been a review, but more of an essay on various issues, but the bottom line is that without having seen this series again, I wouldn’t have had reason to consider some of these questions. And I think that’s the real joy of finding a gem like this. When entertainment entertains you, but also makes you question your place in society, your norms, mores, and taboos, or your logical standing on certain issues, then it’s no longer simply entertainment. It’s important. It’s social commentary.

We are evolving as a global society. There will be more nasty consequences of this in the short term, but it’s nearly impossible to imagine this won’t eventually be true. Cultural differences are going to meld and morph. The more we know one another, the more we will realize there are more similarities than differences. And when that happens, many issues we face today will no longer haunt our everyday lives. But new ones will.

Even as this global society emerges, we are evolving as human beings too. Whether nature is driving the evolution or our own instinctual drive to invent, improve, and reshape ourselves and our environment pushes us is immaterial. We are replacing organs. We have prosthetics. We already have devices that respond to brain impulses. So how long is it before the first cyborg actually graces our world? Sounds like fantasy, right? Like something you’d find in an anime.

In closing, I’ll say this: If you’ve never read the GIS manga, do it. If you’ve never seen the original anime? Do it. And if you have a chance to see ALL of Stand Alone Complex, you won’t regret it. There are so many more things I could talk about, but it would result in spoilers. And we don’t want that. But I urge you to take the plunge. You’ll enjoy it more than you thought possible.

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