Merging an AI with a human brain

DING DING DING we have a winner!!!!!

Yep they easily could of written the story with SAM as a VI with a fancy I/F.  Instead Mr Walters still miffed about the HUGE outcry to his ending in ME3 said "I will show you clowns I will force it down your throats and not give you a choice."

Awful writing.  I am actually somewhat enjoying this game, but man the story line and character interaction are really bad bad.  Thank you Mr Walters and as long as you are led on ME I will NOT be buying another ME game.

Personally, if I could get a computer to manage my inefficient biology. I'm all for it. Lengthen my telomeres and such.

SAM sounds more like what the Geth did to help the Quarians adapt to Rannoch quickly, using the benefits of an AI to help an organic achieve something they can't do themselves. Alec clearly wanted to give humanity as it was an advantage by using artificial intelligence in a new way, not to create some new being.

Synthesis was an attempt to shatter the lines between organics and synthetics (somehow). SAM doesn't even try to do this at all, Ryder is still clearly human, is clearly still in control, and doesn't wish to make out with their toaster.

I doubt it since Ryder wouldn't be Special then.

I think SAM is, for all intents and purposes, becoming Ryder.

He's, after all, experiencing organic life as Ryder Senior and Junior.

There's literally no change in Ryder's personality over the course of the game (unless of course you enforce it as the player, which would make cool headcanon I suppose). Far as we know, SAM doesn't have access to these parts of Ryder and cannot control their motor functions as well. There's also a doctor and apparently qualified psychologist on board, which would probably be adept at noticing the erratic behavior that would ensue if Ryder was influenced by an AI whose understanding of the human mind seems far more rudimentary than EDI's.

SAM's integrity is also tied to Ryder's, as Alec explains. So there's little incentive on him attempting to destroy his creator/host. I think daddy Ryder thought his plan relatively through. 

I mean, you say that about SAM, yet we see more instances of organics influencing/taking over other organics in Andromeda (the Kett, those ex-Cerberus scientists on Kadara) than we see of SAM even attempting to do so.

Wait, so a game five years in the making is based on something Elon Musk just now announced?  Are the people are BioWare prophets?  Time travelers?  Seriously, I'm not sure how this makes sense.  OTOH, I'm reading the middle of a trilogy of books the covers AI being a threat to organic life.  The first book in the series came out in 2009.  Maybe it was inspired by ME1 (though I'm not sure the anti-AI stuff was quite as hammered home at that point).  Then there's Battlestar Galactica from 2004.  Covers some related themes.

The reality is that science is moving in this direction and science fiction is going to mirror it.

Elon Musk is just an example of what I'm talking about.  My point is more that I'm tired of esoteric techno oracles in general.  These guys are like the tech equivalent of Nostradamus.  It's really fun to have a story playing with the prophecies of Nostradamus, but when it seems like the writers start taking it seriously....it's just .  

Sure, just like any tech in the future is.

Thats the whole point of sci-fi though right? And besides, it will happen - the question is not if, but when - and what we will do about it regulation wise.

Just like self-driving cars to take a modern day example. The tech is about ready to go large scale, but our leaders are not doing the changes needed to accommodate what will be a revolution in the transportation industry in the coming years.

We have the beginings of AI available today, so I fail to see why this is a large stretch. There is alot of money and brainpower going into the whole idea of implants in humans as it is, so I would be extremely careful with saying what can, and cannot be done. Think of how much has changed from the early 2000's till now from a technology perspective, then take that same amount of years, and project it into the future. We're in for an exciting ride.

Imagine if you could go back to the early 1900's and tell them that in a hundred years, all the worlds information would be at their fingertips in devices they could fit in their coat pocket, but that we would use it to view funny pictures of animals. Lots will change, human-machine interfacing will be just one of them.