? Mass Effect: Reaper shackles

[Renars]

OK, at the end of ME 2 we learned that reapers are made by liquifying millions of individuals, thus creating something like an organic (and quantum?) supercomputer, that also houses the collective knowledge of liquified individuals AND their original species genetic materials/blueprints, and in Legion's own words:

...even then we could not fully comprehend them. They are magnitudes above us. A single thought was immense, overwhelming... unknowable.

Click to shrink...

And yet, ME 3 we learned that they are shackled to Catalyst (practically a VI !!) with it's "solution" that the Reapers must fallow.

What I want to know is: without Catalyst's shackle how intelligent are the Reapers? Could they find the solution to organic-syntethic problem?

 

[Nospurratu]

Catalyst was an AI. The problem it saw was that once organics reached a certain developmental point, they made AI servants who would eventually evolve and outpace their makers. When this happens, neither side comes out the better from it. So the solution it came up with was the "melt sufficiently evolved organics into new reapers, kill all other examples of organic life that were evolved past a certain level of complexity, leave the rest alone" plan that they repeated every 50,000 years.

 

[Renars]

Yes, but Starboy stopped finding the solution. After IT concluded at the beginning that there can only be 2, maybe 3 action, it started the "most successful" one and every Reaper afterwards was crippled AI with, possibly, better insight in organic/syntethic conflict.

I mean just look at Geth: children that wanted to make their parents proud, and yet they tried to kill them

 

[Nospurratu]

The Catalyst already found what it believed was the optimal solution. It's goal was to preserve organic life at what it deemed was it height, before whatever the new organic hot stuff on the block started to make AI, because it had determined that when organics make true AI it's only a matter of time until both peoples go to war because the ability to make AI is developed before people are ready for AI to coexist. The Quarian/Geth situation? Absent Shepard intervening in ME2/ME3, the Quarians would have completed their own genocide by attacking the Geth and the Geth would have been crippled horribly, which would lead to further organic vs Geth conflict if the Reapers weren't invading at the time. That's the kind of situation the Reapers wanted to avoid.

They just decided that the best way to do that is to melt people and turn them into evil space lobster cyborgs.

 

[KlavoHunter]

Given that the Reapers allegedly serve as a storage of a species' genetics and knowledge, it doesn't seem entirely impossible for the Reapers to re-establish their species, once a better solution to the AI/organic 'problem' is implemented.

Plus, still having your species' Reaper around is nice just in case you need an hack-proof walking dreadnought for defense...

 

[Renars]

To be honest Leviathan's are partially responsible for AI-cism, in some of their dialogs it was mentioned that they "enthralled" multiple species, got tributes from them, and when these subjects started to build synthetics that rebelled against them, but let's be honest: those who created were affected by Leviathan's mind-control and had partial brain damage, thus problems in creating.

At least that's how I understood that, anyways, The VI the Leviathans created, was build perfectly, BUT was given incorrect instructions that it fulfilled to the letter.

But here's the thing: Reapers are not "sophisticated VIs" but semi-organic computers/brains that are capable of advancing, unless they are shackled, like EDI.

And organic computers/brains have a tendency to "mutate", "change", "adapt/advance" so without those Catalyst's shackles how do you think how intelligent the Reapers would have been?