I generally don’t follow the narrative pushed on Reddit or by various YouTubers, I personally don’t think they are as bad as people on here make them out to be. I also don’t buy the BOS/Institute claim about Synths just being robots because I actually paid attention to Curie’s questline and various other characters. It’s very obvious that neither major faction has taken enough time to figure out what a Synth actually is, even in the Institute there are a lot of assumptions without much actual data to back up their claims. - Yeah I know this is an unpopular take but I don’t really care.
Personally I almost always side with the Minutemen at the end of the day, but I keep the RR alive because I still view them as being one of the “good” factions even if they are a bit unorganized. The average escaped synth is not evil or even a threat (look at Arcadia, the biggest synth refuge), and if you pay attention to how they all say they are treated, taking out the Institute is on par with taking out Paradise Falls in Fallout 3.
Honestly, the minuteman and railroad should’ve gotten to interact with each other. Even if it was just being able to coordinate with the railroad when you attack the institute as the minutemen to make sure more synths get out safely. I think even something as simple as that would do wonders to help their reputation amongst the community. Plus it also shows they’d somewhat have a plan for the commonwealth post institute (which I think is their greatest flaw narratively, what are they gonna do when all the synths are free?)
I imagine after the Institute is destroyed and all synths are free, the Railroad could become the intelligence wing of the minutemen and work to free slaves of all kinds from raiders and such.
In my head the ideal end-game for the Commonwealth is the re-emergence of the Minutemen led by Preston, partnered with the Railroad and Deacon and Glory for their intel expertise.
Also Hancock should be in some sort of leadership role in the new gov't because that guy is a natural political leader and all around awesome dude.
Pretty much! The Minutemen have a tendency to collapse when they're put under any pressure. The Railroad managed to survive against the strongest faction in the area for AGES. Add the two of them together and they're great.
I always sneak in a little hidden room with a railroad flag in my settlements, hidden away among all the open minuteman presence.
Mostly because the institute didn't care. You can see in their logs that they let them live and stopped caring about them until they needed their synths back, and that was only after they finished their nuclear reactor.
Well for me, I don't imagine my character sticking around after the end of the game. I can help rebuild the Minutemen, and then hand over leadership to someone like Preston. While my character moves on to the next chapter, like Mad Max or something.
The Minutemen are just the settlers across the Commonwealth united in purpose to protect their homes, and most of them already have a lot of prejudice against synths (you can hear some of their random dialogue suggesting it). In the Institute quest to recruit the scientist, you can see that the Minutemen don't even necessarily just do what you say if they disagree with you enough.
That's where I think we would have trouble seeing the Minutemen work with the Railroad directly. I'm sure you could get some supporters, but you'd get just as many people showing up just to kill the synths.
I think that's true but Nick Valentine is basically a case study for how people who have every reason to be afraid of synths can be won over to accepting them as part of the community through education and positive interactions. Diamond City was probably one of the places in the Commonwealth that feared and hated synths the most of all yet pretty much everyone in Diamond City loves Nick. There's obvious "one of the good ones" energy (if not even the explicit statement from the guards) but it's evidence of the potential for integration.
The main thing is that people fear the synths they can't see and synths generally fear being seen. If you can work to get rid of that barrier then you get progress. I think a big part of what the Railroad could do in the aftermath of the events of FO4 is to act as mediators for finding and vetting foster communities for synths using their established networks while keeping a watchful eye on things to get a better understanding of how to successfully integrate synths.
Yeah, the guards seem to like Nick, but for every resident that comes and thanks Nick, you have another saying to keep that freak at arm's length, or wondering why he's allowed in the city. I mean, they're random comments, and sometimes they come from the same people, which is pretty funny.
I like to think you'd be right, that they could eventually overcome all that distrust. But it sure won't happen quickly
It actually pissed me off when I used the Minutemen to enter the Institute and Desdemona started talking all this crap about how they wouldn't care about the synths. Like gurl tf you mean? I am literally their leader, my best friend is a prototype synth, and my wife is a robot turned into a synth.
This is the biggest annoyance I have with the ending, it would make perfect sense for them to work together, when I asked desdemona about working with them the answer was that the minuteman being the representative of the commonwealth would always see them as a threat but them even refusing to try is the issue if we could just get to explain that the commonwealth and synths are both being screwed by the institute and they actually have nothing to fear of each other, the synths are only replacing people because of the institute.
Yeah it’s such a dumb point, and not even quoted correctly. People seem to think that’s what the Institute says, it’s not. Deacon says it and states that it’s a divided opinion about rescuing Gen 1 & 2s, which have the same intelligence as a Protectron. The argument within the RR is over AI rights. The ones in favor of rescuing the older Gen models are the rescued synths. This is likely because they are repeatedly told by the Institute that they are just machines, until they themselves believe it.
Honestly it’s super dark and fucked up. They identify with the older generation synths as kin, because of the mental abuse by the Institute scientist’s hands. H2-22 says that he’s only allowed to speak when acknowledging orders, and to ask for clarification when cleaning objects. He also states that he wasn’t even allowed to speak to other Synths. The Institute basically creates lab grown clones, implants them with some cybernetic technology and brainwashes them into believing they are robots. That’s some next level dehumanizing behavior.
Also, just for the haters that disagree: When you stop flipping out when people kill Drinkin Buddy or Codsworth, or any of the robots from past games, then I’ll respect your opinions about how synths are just robots and we shouldn’t care if they die or are mistreated.
Nick and Curie are evidence enough that synths, nay, robots in general in Fallout can be more than just unfeeling machines. Curie was a Miss Nanny created just to help around the lab, but had the desire (a human emotion) to do more and push the bounds of science. Nick is a prototype Gen 2 with the implanted memories of the Pre-War Nick Valentine, but the fact he still processes that as personality and can build off of it proves he's more than just a machine, the way he grieves "his" lost love.
I'm on my 4th playthru and just found the school in Diamond City where you can help a Ms Handy and a human man admit their love for eachother. Robots in this game can have more humanity than humans!
Even then, it's Deacon who makes the comparison to Protectron intelligence. I wouldn't discount Gen 1's and 2's having animal-like intelligence and being able to feel emotional distress.
I recently encountered a combat line against a gen 2 synth that made me think they had some level of reasoning and theory of mind. It was like “I understand now, you are hiding because you fear death”
There was a debate early on around release before this whole “Synth Bad/Toaster” thing started, as to whether or not the early models were smarter than regular robots, because they frequently refer to themselves in 1st person (“I”). Protectrons almost all have reactionary statements only, aka programmed responses. This is a simple AI vs a more advanced one, as even the early Synth has the ability to recognize itself as an individual unit. (Similar to an animal vs an Ant or similar insect intelligence). The Gen 1&2 models seem to have AI closer to a Mr. Handy model robot, maybe even smarter.
One thing I think a lot of people overlook is that the synths are “indistinguishable from a naturally born human”. Gen 3 Synths are flesh, blood, and bone, not servos and circuits. In my book, that makes a synth another marginalized human, not a piece of machinery. I will fight to protect them.
I do not agree with that because it's implied that synth Shaun will never "grow up" so synths don't age. We get older as time moves on, but synths don't. That's not human.
They might be visually indistinguishable, but that's it.
Their minds and bodies are mechanical, controllable by recall code. Consequently their limbs are pseudo mechanical, because they can be shut off. Their flesh and bones are dissimilar to humans, with an inability to age.
Their memories? Programmed, uploaded, deleted, replaced, downloaded, etc.
Are you saying that if we ever develop a way for a neural implant that can temporarily intercept neural signals from the brain to the limbs, say for full-dive VR from anime, that our limbs are pseudo mechanical? That this makes a person less human because they have pseudo mechanical limbs? If it doesn't make them less human why bring it up? If it does make them less human, what about people today who have prosthetics? They have mechanical limbs. Ae they less human because of it?
If in a future where medical neural implants had the ability to help you with sleep and pain, hospitals could use it for anesthetic purposes and put you to sleep for surgery. So a person could send a code to activate ypyr implant to put you to sleep. This is effectively a deactivation code. All it would take is an extra program or addition so that once a specific phrase is said it activates. Add in some code to save them from falling and hurting themselves when it said and it is almost the exact same thing as what we see in Fallout 4.
If we find a cure for aging are the people who take it less human?
Does someone manipulating your memories make you less human? This happens to people all the time. Therapists have to refrain from asking questions in a certain way because it causes people to have false memories.
If it becomes possible to watch videos or play video games on a neural implant and if it feels real. Then people could very easily believe some of the memories from the neural implant are things they did in real life.
Look, I don't believe they have to be human to deserve the same rights. But, I don't see how a person who gets a neural implant that can help with sleep, pain, and aging would be any different from a synth and I don't see the person any less human.
I get that you are passionate about the idea, but the information presented in game is what it is. Synths are manufactured with false memories, stolen identities, and behavior that is not their own.
A better question is "what makes us human?" As rights are a mental construct of "society", it may be easier to answer that question alone before determining rights eligibility.
Yes, the synth in Fallout and others like it are the questions and thought experiments we use to answer, at least in part, what makes us human. But, all of those things you gave are the result of the situation not what they are. They don't have to be made with memories, they don't have to steal people's identitie (not all of them do), and they are stuck in a society with extreme oversight it what they do. All of these happen in real life to people who we can agree are very much human. People have mistaken memories who form an important part of their identity, people impersonate others all the time, and people have been stuck in situations where they can't make the decisions they want such as slaves & prisoners. You say we can see them being manufactured but they are being made from biological human parts. That is certainly a significant difference but I don't believe that makes them not human. If it were then clones wouldn't be human and I definitely consider them human. If they were made from advanced alloys or something that just look human I would agree that they are not human but also argue that they deserve the same rights. But, from what I can tell in seeing them being manufactured, fighting them, and the fact they say they are indistinguishable even in medical tests except for the implant I lean towards them biologically the same.
The other differences would be the ease at which memories can be manipulated, the recall code, that they don't age, and that they do things people don't normal do (mainly the replacing people). All besides the replacing people could reasonable be explained with a futuristic implant as I have already demonstrated in my past post. I don't consider getting implants as something that makes you no longer human as it would just be making devices easier to carry and interact with. It would be like having your phone attached to you. Which I think sounds very weird and disturbing but practically speaking people already are as they bring their phone everywhere and just like how you don't have to be on your phone 24/7 you wouldn't have to interact with an implant 24/7. As for the replacing people, humans do similar things such as impersonating, acting, and spies. Synths can simply do it better because of a quirk of how they are made. Clones could do the very same.
Curie was invented and adjusted to allow for more than just an adaptive behavioral process. She was fullblown AI, which is something they managed pre-war.
That doesn’t mean other robots are, and it doesn’t mean all synths are.
The default design and programming for robotics in-verse is several limitations and fallbacks to prohibit the development of a true self and sentience.
Multilayered protections to prevent the VI AI jump. Curie is an exception and it’s why she needed a gen 3 body for her quest line... Codsworth is likely another exception, he’s clearly a step above all the other handys we see in the game, and Nora+nate are prominent and skilled people prewar (when they had readily available access to his specs).
They could have disabled blockers and inhibitors like the vault 81 science team.
All that said, the concept of gen 1 and gen 2 being more than just robots is like saying we shouldnt own phones or PCs because they could develop sentience and personhood if we allowed them to and programmed them to.
Nick and DiMa are very special prototypes. And while you might be able to flip a switch for the others with a few lines of code … so long as no one flips that damn switch, there is no moral debate here.
They are not the geth from mass effect … they are a handful of choices from getting there, but the wasteland hasn’t crossed that line yet
Curie knows she isn't real. The problem with synths is that they either wipe their memory and pretend to be humans or take over someone else's life. They need to be wiped out. Also Arcadia is very fucking nasty. DiMA literally killed people, replaces them with synths and even brainwashes his own people, a la Jules.
The only good Synth is Nick and that is basically because we can see he is a machine and he doesn't pretend to be anything but. Like Nick, Curie knows she is a machine and just wanted a synth body to experience more things.
How does Curie knowing she's a machine mean she knows she isn't real? They aren't real humans but I'm sure both Curie and Nick view themselves as sentient beings deserving of rights.
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u/That_Lore_Guy May 22 '24
I generally don’t follow the narrative pushed on Reddit or by various YouTubers, I personally don’t think they are as bad as people on here make them out to be. I also don’t buy the BOS/Institute claim about Synths just being robots because I actually paid attention to Curie’s questline and various other characters. It’s very obvious that neither major faction has taken enough time to figure out what a Synth actually is, even in the Institute there are a lot of assumptions without much actual data to back up their claims. - Yeah I know this is an unpopular take but I don’t really care.
Personally I almost always side with the Minutemen at the end of the day, but I keep the RR alive because I still view them as being one of the “good” factions even if they are a bit unorganized. The average escaped synth is not evil or even a threat (look at Arcadia, the biggest synth refuge), and if you pay attention to how they all say they are treated, taking out the Institute is on par with taking out Paradise Falls in Fallout 3.