[MASSIVE PLOT SPOILER DISCUSSION] - WAU

[RossisBoss]

Sure you can sympathize with WAU. And even if you don't it's sort of irrelevant when you just use the technology and resources it freely provides you without any ulterior motive. If not for Simon being freaked out at his situation and murdering robots left and right, his situation is actually not that bad at all. As far as Amy (and Carl, and apparently a good number of copies) we have already learned that all it takes to help her is pop out her cortex core, slap on some eye cameras, stick it into the neck of a nearby corpse and pour in gobs of structure gel and all of a sudden she is now an immortal robot transhuman that needs neither food nor air and can survive in virtually any environment if you properly shield the electronics. At that point rebuilding civilization is simply a matter of time and hard work.

Of course, it is easier to be mopey and have existential crises than to roll up one's sleeves and apply good ole' human ingenuity and hard work.

edit: my point on Ross being that before his death and subsequent apparent insanity and failure to reason or question previously held beliefs, he never imagined a circumstance like Simon-2 would ever happen. edit: oh wait he had considered it a possibility. So yeah, his position is actually just genocidal racism and unconscionable.

Rebuilding civilization? There was around 60-70 people alive by the time WAU began to rampage. Subtract from that number the people who killed themselves and were disposed of, the people who drowned out in the ocean, those who were picked off by/torn to shreds by crazed sea life or maimed by insane robots who had had human brain scans forced upon them and the supply of usable corpses is very, very slim. But how would they even build a civilization? Simon only coped with the situation because he believed firmly that he could escape it. Corpses can't reproduce, for one.

Simon's existence was a bad thing, despite what he accomplished. WAU considered the preservation of humanity in a very black and white manner. Reviving corpses, having a large quantity of human minds, despite their being insane, was okay. It isn't some racism or wanting to commit genocide; it's wanting to stop a chain of suffering that had started back when the comet hit. Having your mind forced into the body of one of your dead friends isn't alright. Catherine was only okay with it because she was explicitly a strange loner. Simon had no personal relationships with any of the bodies he inhabited, and again saw them simply as a means to an ends when saving himself - but he still says time and time again how wrong it feels to be using the bodies of those who have been killed by WAU.

The ARK ensures that everyone who was scanned is allowed to live on. Destroying WAU ensures that its experiments stop and some manner of the natural life on Earth is preserved without being mutated so that eventually something new may evolve from the ashes untouched. There is no reason to leave the WAU. It is a wide-spreading and uncontrollable AI set on desecrating the corpse of the human race - quite literally.