In 1995, a movie called Ghost in the Shell was released in November after it gather international attention at the Tokyo International Film Festival. It was the one of the earliest films to bring anime to a broader audience. Once it hit the box office it promptly flopped, narrowly failing to recoup production costs. It did far better with at home media allowing it to live on as a cult classic.
Its poor success is not surprising since the film feels more like an hour and a half long piece on art and philosophy than it does a thrilling film focused on an international scandal in cyberpunk Tokyo. The opening scene of Major Motoko Kusanagi diving off a roof top before turning invisible thanks to futuristic thermal-optic technology before interrupting a police raid, by a police section labelled Section 6, focused on stopping a foreign diplomat from getting a programmer to defect. She does so by assassinating the diplomat and then disappearing once again with the same technology. The movie shifts its focus to a the Major and the rest of Section 9, a government black ops group, pursuing and a garbage man that has been performing hacks at various stops along his route. Once Section 9 apprehends the man he is found to have had his cybernetic body hacked. He wasn’t living alone in an apartment because he had divorced from his wife, he was living alone because he had never married. The hacks he had preformed would aid an entirely different cause than helping him see his kid. In short he hadn’t lived any of what he remembered. Section 9 pursues the back down the line trying to find the “Puppet Master” who is hacking people and replacing their memories. Their most likely suspect ends up being another hacked person like garbage man.
On a separate night in the future, a cybernetic body is hit on the road after escaping a facility that creates military bodies. Kusanagi and her team take in the body and begin to analyze it. This leads to the discovery that there is remanence of someone in the body despite the body having never been used. Chief Nakamura from Section 6 goes to Section 9, lead in whole by Chief Aramaki, to request that the body be handed over as it is relevant in their work. While the two are talking, the body animates and reveals that their inhabitant is an AI who is the Puppet Master while also asking to be recognized as both a citizen and a lifeform. This is promptly interrupted by Section 6 attempting to covertly raid Section 9 to recover the AI. A chase ensues which ends with the Kusanagi conversing with AI about life and mortality. The Puppet Master suggests that the two of them fuse their consciousness. Both Kusangi and the Puppet Masters’ bodies are destroyed by Section 6 and Kusangi’s team recovers what is left of her moving her to a new cybernetic body for the time being. In a conversation between Kusangi, now in the cybernetic body of a child, and Batou, her friend and coworker, she reveals that she is agreed to merge with the Puppet Master and is no longer Kusanagi or the Puppet Master but someone else who’s a bit of both of them.
One of the fundamental concepts of the movie is “ghosts vs shells”. A shell is someone’s body fully cybernetic, enhanced, or still made of flesh, while a ghost is their consciousness complete with sentience and sense of self. For humans in the movies, a ghost could move from one shell to the next and still be considered the same person. This is not considered true for AI or any machine as they are often thought not to possess ghosts. One of the fundamental things that seems to separate most programs today from the Puppet Master is that today’s AI are constrained to only think about their environment (as well as interactions with it such as actuators and sensors). By giving one the ability of one to think about “the self” we are no longer the same because it includes the ability not only to adapt to environment based on performance metrics but to adapt to the environment based on needs and wants that can be formed on one’s own. In the movie, intuition are thoughts that come from one’s ghost. It is unexplainable but there regardless of what all is directly observed.
In society thus far machines have always been treated as less than human because they do not have any semblance of a “ghost”. By creating more intelligent machines we introduce higher levels or processing and interacting with the environment. Neither the movie nor today’s society is prepared for any level of interaction with another lifeform that is sentient (alien or AI) because we have laws and rules heavily instilled in our own concepts of culture. In the movie, the AI argue that they should have rights because they can form their own thoughts and although they run on code humans also run on code. This code their talking about is DNA. Since we grow from DNA and form based on how we are described in it, our “shells” are constructed on a specific code and we use them to follow the same interactions with the environment. In a world where bodies become can be replaced or modified in a synthetic manner after we are first born, are we that different from an AI which was formed of code and took on a synthetic body later?
Ultimately, I do not think so. This gets us to the legal argument that all of our legal systems are steeped in a very specific perception. For example, our gender markers are assigned and noted in many different government databases. It’s information that is assessed by doctors, insurance companies, and the government to make decisions about us. However, this is a made up thing that might give trends but only contributes to those agencies if your concept of self matches with the one you were assigned. If we introduce an AI which has a “ghost” what gender marker do you give them? It’s an impossible question because they come from a different origin than that entire system. They state in the film that they refer to the Puppet Master as he as a general term but don’t actually know what the gender of the Puppet Master is. Similarly, later in the film the Puppet Master comments on children as being a thing that cannot be achieved similarly because children should follow evolution and differ slightly from their parents (hence a copy is not a child). Given that the Puppet Master has a “ghost” they should have rights. Within both our legal rights there is an assumption that there is some sort of contract (marriage) and the parents can have some sort of child that is some combination of both of them (life and evolution). This is what occurs at the end of the film between Kusanagi and the Puppet Master and the final character, who bears the name Kusanagi, is the child of the two. How our current society would interact with someone that is both so different and so similar cannot be known for sure. However, if we interact in the same manner that we interact with each other when we have differing cultures, I am pretty sure we will just fight about it until one culture is destroyed.