The Gene of AI

Episode 11

If there's one lesson you should take away from this episode, it's this: don't go hot-air ballooning. It only leads to identity crises. This week, The Gene of AI revisits some of its earlier ideas about Humanoids and their unique complicating factors as it explores how they affect Risa across her past and present. What it lacks in novelty, the script makes up for with heightened melodrama that works pretty well for the most part. Risa has been a likable goofball for the lion's share of the season, so I don't mind seeing her bear more emotional heft.

Her past as a patient of Sudo's clarifies their relationship greatly. Sudo arguably overstepped a few professional boundaries by keeping in contact with her past her physical therapy. Still, it makes sense that they would have bonded over their shared mommy issues. Risa's anger (Yume Miyamoto nails her reading of “she made me without asking, changed me without asking, then died without asking”) echoes a universal frustration beyond biological or synthetic brain matter. It's the cry of people left behind to pick up the pieces that parents/prior generations couldn't or wouldn't pick up themselves. Changing her infant daughter's hair color not to match her awful ex-husband is hardly a grave sin, but it's still her mom's choice without Risa's consent. Regardless of her intentions, it meant her daughter had to deal with the fallout all by herself years down the line. That's hardly fair.

Fairness, however, has little to do with how life plays out. While The Gene of AI's vignettes have highlighted all kinds of injustices, Tu Fui goes through some of the worst. Her life is the dark reflection of Risa's—born illegally into an abusive household through no fault of her own. In the case of Nature versus Nurture, Gene seems to lean towards nature here, as Tu Fui fundamentally remains a good person despite her terrible circumstances. Murdering her father was an act of self-defense years in the making, and while she approaches Risa to take over her life, she can't bring herself to kill an innocent person in the end.

This doesn't stop Tu Fui from getting locked up, which further highlights how arbitrary the scales of justice can be. In the eyes of the law, this case is probably simple. Risa was born first, and her dad illegally copied her neural net to make Tu Fui. Risa is the original. However, Risa's original body died, and she only survived because Sudo could transplant her neural net into a brand new body. If we assume a persistence of identity across an individual brain print, then Risa would still be the “original,” but now things are fuzzier. Certain procedures are okay, yet others aren't. Most people would agree that making a clone of someone behind their back, especially by a shitty dad for selfish purposes, is terrible. But it doesn't seem right that the clone should then be punished for it. Is incarceration the best solution here? You could argue that this extreme punishment drove Tu Fui to contemplate killing Risa in the first place. If there were more rehabilitative avenues to help these copies come to terms with their existence and integrate into society as their own people, then Risa could have had a healthy relationship with her “sister.”

These are the issues Michi is contemplating with his upcoming update, and perhaps that's why he wants Sudo's input so badly. Given their physical resemblance, I'm half-expecting Michi to be a copy of Sudo or vice versa, but I think Gene could also surprise me with something more down-to-earth. The writing's strength has been its consistent ability to tie big ideas to practical, near-future concerns. Sudo has all this firsthand experience from searching for his mother's copy, all of his cases from the clinic, and his work as Moggadeet, so he surely has valuable input. We're inclined to imagine a super AI's evolution in terms of technological advances, but ethical and societal developments are no less important. They are more critical when weighing the future of as flawed a species as ours. No amount of artificial intelligence can get around our necessary struggle to be better and kinder to each other.

I'm confident Sudo and Risa's parting will be temporary. He may have only gotten into this gig to probe the whereabouts of his other mother better, but it's not like finding her will make his clientele disappear. Also, good on the series for finally making me care enough about the two of them to want to see Sudo and Risa continue working together. All they needed was a dash of shared childhood trauma, and boom, I was in. I was also thrilled to see Risa meeting up with Reon for lunch. Unsurprisingly, we don't get any answer about how Reon's procedure did or didn't go, but all that matters is that they're still friends. It means there are still opportunities for hope to shine through the dark cloud of technology and society.

Rating:

Gene of AI is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Steve is on Twitter until the day it completely succumbs to the t-shirt bots. You can also catch him chatting about trash and treasure alike on This Week in Anime.