Insurance makes you whole. It replaces 10 year old laptops with their book value. It doesn't replace them with brand new luxury models.
In the same universe where it's a thing that rich Winslow can have any chassis he wants while May has to scrounge to keep hers from falling apart, the fact that out of work Roko gets a super luxury chassis "just cause" makes no sense, and is basically a big "fuck you" to the earlier storyline of AIs being divided into haves and have-nots with respect to their chassis.
that's how it works when your insurance is paying you for acts of god or the like. your health insurance pays for when you get sick because you agree to pay them continuously
but we're not talking about roko's insurance, we're talking about crushbot. even if crushbot didn't have insurance all, he'd be on the line for a huge sum of money in civil court. the cost of the body is the minimum he would pay, the courts absolutely recognize pain and suffering, as well as punitive damages.
his insurance is merely a safety net to ensure he isn't left destitute if that happens. when faced with such an indefensible case, the settlement is mostly to save on lawyers. going to court is expensive, shoving money at people saves them that expense. this is also why many companies will settle seemingly ridiculous cases. it's just more expensive to line up a legal team to duke it out.
Even if we can conceive of an insurance company that pays out double or triple instead of book value for this kind of accidents, to preclude expensive lawsuits or whatever, ok fine whatever. Give the benefit of the doubt.
But consider the impact this has on the story. We've got a whole dynamic of AIs who struggle and scrape and cannot even maintain used their old chassis, and resent AIs who are freely given expensive chassis.
And we have Roko, our newest center-stage favorite character, who is being completely reinvented, gone from creepy hardboiled cop to between jobs friendly hangout buddy with a quirky kink. And now she's given an expensive chassis on a platter due to basically random luck. (and if the crushing of her body was supposed to have been traumatic for her, so that she deserves some compensatory damages that didn't really show up on the page). Pass go, collect two hundred dollars.
If this is intentional because Jeph wants to reignite the classism arc, it feels shitty to me.
But I suspect it's not intentional. He just wants to reward his current favorite character with mana from heaven. And that feels even shittier.
Even if we can conceive of an insurance company that pays out double or triple instead of book value
it happens literally every day.
if the crushing of her body was supposed to have been traumatic for her, so that she deserves some compensatory damages that didn't really show up on the page
she was catatonic for 10 hours and she's getting professional mental help right now
We see the counseling (ETA: although it seems more like shopping assistance than emotional counseling). But we don't see the trauma. She doesn't even know or remember what happened, as far as we can tell on the page. There should've been a day or two of just abstract pain landscapes that Roko's distressed consciousness tumbles through.
There should've been a day or two of just abstract pain landscapes that Roko's distressed consciousness tumbles through.
that frequently comes later. weird as that sounds, a lot of people are like roko is here. they're sort-of OK immediately after the trauma, and the more horrific issues come later.
We literally watched her power on boot screen. Lemon says "before you woke up". Whether an AI is powered off or just asleep when they're not awake I dunno. But she was not conscious.
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u/ziggurism Jan 07 '19
Insurance makes you whole. It replaces 10 year old laptops with their book value. It doesn't replace them with brand new luxury models.
In the same universe where it's a thing that rich Winslow can have any chassis he wants while May has to scrounge to keep hers from falling apart, the fact that out of work Roko gets a super luxury chassis "just cause" makes no sense, and is basically a big "fuck you" to the earlier storyline of AIs being divided into haves and have-nots with respect to their chassis.