The only way to get this to work was to go with an evolutionary AI, one that could evolve over time. They knew that was really dangerous but couldn’t come up with a better alternative.
An AI is the only thing that can take on another AI. The Faro swarm already had a head start, and was by their own description the apex predator of hacking, so they did everything to prevent their AI from coming into contact with it. They buried it underground, shielded, so it would never be discovered. This is why Elizabeth died, making sure that happened. They predicted it would take 50 years to decrypt the override key for the swarm, this way bought them that time. [quote=“Richard_Holt, post:57, topic:128715”]
3) Why can’t they tell us what the signal that corrupted Hades is?
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Horizon 2! Yay!
Huh, all the components were independent but interrelated?[quote=“Richard_Holt, post:57, topic:128715”]
5) Why was Ted Faro ever given any kind of admin access into this thing?
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He was the money. The project would never have been feasible without the resources of the Faro corporation and the governments. Turning him in to the public would have been a waste of resources. There is an audio log of Elizabeth telling the other members of Zero Dawn to keep him happy.
I am not sure of the time line but was this perhaps after she blew herself up?
This is silly though… in the situation we’re talking about, you don’t need “his money”. You fucking confiscate it. When the world is ending, martial law goes into effect.
There was no reason at all for Faro to even be alive at the end.
No, it was well before that.
GAIA blew herself up 19 years ago, at the same time you were born.
The initial batch of humans would have been kicked out of the cradles much earlier than that, given we know that multiple generations have passed, to the extent that no one even remembers the cradles, and humanity has re-established some non-trivial civilization.
It’s only silly if you don’t think they needed to hide the end of the world. You can’t confiscate the world’s largest company from its owner without creating shockwaves. There is at least one data log that goes into the contortions Ted had to do in order to get this project going without setting off suspicions, especially in the early days. Think how much harder that would have been coming from a replacement stooge rather than their everyday leader.
Except in the beginning it hadn’t killed a billion+ people and they really didn’t want the idea that it would it eventually get to that point out in the open. They actively covered up the robots killing people in the beginning, then later pushed this as something they could win. Obviously that wasn’t true, but executing Faro and confiscating his stuff would have been a draconian, unprecedented move at a time they were busy saying ‘keep calm and carry on’.
The plan was always to kick the kids out eventually. They needed to learn to thrive on their own. Coddling them forever with robot nannies would have been counterproductive. The only thing that really changed there was the education program could never be executed on.
Well, the plan wasn’t to “kick them out” as much as train them to take over and restart society.
However, one thing that isn’t really ever dealt with, is that we know there were more than one cradle. Presumably, these different cradles would have all been producing populations of humans…and you’d think that they would have been set up to communicate with each other. Otherwise, you’d have a bunch of factions dumped out into the world, and even if they had received training from Apollo, you’d almost certainly have some kind of major issues.
I don’t think there would ever have been a way to prevent provincialism so I don’t really consider that any kind of problem with the story or the plan.
He wasn’t exiled. He’s wife and daughter were killed by out-lander raiders, he asked to be named a Deathseeker so he could leave the Sacred Land and kill them. The deal with that is that he can never return. But after killing the killers, he passed out dying just outside the Sacred Land, and a Brave who had a family member killed by the same raiders broke the rules and pulled him back to the Sacred Land. The matriarchs made a special exception, and let him live as an outcast in the Embrace.
After you become the Anointed, you can talk to her. Also it was pretty clear he was dead as you can visit his grave throughout and Aloy has one sided conversations ruminating on all that has happened to her.
I was so glad he didn’t, that’s the stuff that Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raider reboots do all the time. People who died aren’t dead and allies betray you at random, so tiresome. Glad that HZD avoided all that. The only ‘betrayal’ was Sylens, but he was never much of an ally and it’s not totally clear to what degree he might or might not have betrayed you.
To build on this, I think the timeline looks like this:
Faro corp’s newest titan Class peacekeepers go online. They’re the premiere entity in robotic “peacekeeping”.
“Not long after”, somebody notices that while the Peacekeepers are performing their functions, oh fuck we don’t seem to have actual control and can’t turn them off.
It’s immediately obvious where this is heading. The swarms are growing. They are not an immediate thread - they’re just as likely roaming open country as doing anything else, adn they still aren’t that large. But there’s no way to deal with them. There are no failsafes. Conventional, human centered, armed-forces are a thing of decades past.
Faro calls Sobeck in. He’s freaked out by her solution, as he should be (I just adore this aspect of the story, and how they keep revisiting it like the orbital launch base welcome center). However, this is the only time Faro is anything other than completely helpful and doing everything in his power to facilitate Horizon Zero, until he eventually disappears into his underground pyramid.
What I took from the timeline is that at this point swarms weren’t actively doing a ton of damage other than maybe overruning croplands here and there, but those could be easily replaced. Nobody is really thinking anything is going on, outside of a select few (Joint Chiefs, etc). And everyone outside of Faro/Sobeck who thinks something is up is probably sitting there thinking “Faro, shut the fucking robots off already”. I don’t think they find out the truth until Sobeck flies to meet them, but I may be wrong.
It’s not the most tightly written backstory ever, and I get why it bothers some people. But I think Faro’s continued involvement is reasonable in-universe. It’s crucial that at first everything appear normal, and after that it’s crucial that people think there’s a winnable war going on.
You can read a bunch of fun little news stories about Faro robots misbehaving early on, like harvesting some poor farmer mango grove or eating a pod of endangered dolphins.
I don’t understand how Ted Faro was alive to be a pyschopath yet again after almost everybody was dead. They called the killer robots the Faro plague you would think somebody would have shot him in the balls repeatedly before everyone else was wiped out.
