[MASSIVE PLOT SPOILER DISCUSSION] - WAU

[1minus1is0]

I share this feeling. You can not sympathize with WAU. Its reasoning was very black and white and Ross' entire gripe was about how dangerous a machine trying to process and decide what constitutes living was. WAU was fine with reviving corpses. It was fine with merging living people with nearby machinery. I don't see how anyone can look at characters like Amy and think, "Yeah, stopping WAU is unreasonable and Ross is the dick!" If you don't do as Ross asks, it's very likely that WAU would simply continue on with its experiments, creating more Simons (and others, considering the library of brain scans it now controls). Not to mention the environmental impact it was having on sea life.

Also as I recall the WAU was originally created for the purpose of maintaining the structure gel that was holding most of the living/working places together under water. Things began to take a turn for the worse when WAU began to spread structure gel not only around itself, but on people.

Sure you can sympathize with WAU. And even if you don't it's sort of irrelevant when you just use the technology and resources it freely provides you without any ulterior motive. If not for Simon being freaked out at his situation and murdering robots left and right, his situation is actually not that bad at all. As far as Amy (and Carl, and apparently a good number of copies) we have already learned that all it takes to help her is pop out her cortex core, slap on some eye cameras, stick it into the neck of a nearby corpse and pour in gobs of structure gel and all of a sudden she is now an immortal robot transhuman that needs neither food nor air and can survive in virtually any environment if you properly shield the electronics. At that point rebuilding civilization is simply a matter of time and hard work.

Of course, it is easier to be mopey and have existential crises than to roll up one's sleeves and apply good ole' human ingenuity and hard work.

edit: my point on Ross being that before his death and subsequent apparent insanity and failure to reason or question previously held beliefs, he never imagined a circumstance like Simon-2 would ever happen. edit: oh wait he had considered it a possibility. So yeah, his position is actually just genocidal racism and unconscionable.