Ghost in the Shell, the lacking component of the A.I

So you can’t get too much more philosophically deeper with animated films than Ghost in the Shell. It is jam packed with a vast variety of high level pondering about humanity, society, and the dangers of our possible future. One pretty overarching theme however is challenging what ultimately classifies us as human. I would say the film reaches a much different decision that Brian Christian does in Most Human Human. The film breaks down swiftly and jarringly the physical aspects of humanity as much of humanity at this time has begun augmenting itself with cybernetics and the main character of the Major is literally just a mostly human brain with a ‘ghost’ (basically a soul or the equivalent for the movie) inside a completely robotic body. As awkward as she can come off at times she is seems to still retain what Christian would qualify as human. She has a level of purpose and self-awareness that mark her as a sentient being. To her what truly makes her human, at least during her boat speech is that her thoughts and memories are unique to her and she uses these to collect information to use in her own way. This feels similar to the notion of novelty raised in the Most Human Human book.
Yet this is also challenged, first slight with the ghost hacked people who have been implanted with false memories in order to carry out the will of the Puppet master and with the Puppet master him … her…, themselves. The Puppet Master is originally an A.I. that achieved sentience, kinda somehow, and identifies themselves as a sentient lifeform. They posses the same level of novelty that humans do and uses their information for their own purpose. Yet they feel they are lacking something that is in all other types of living organisms, which makes them feel incomplete. This is the ability to reproduce. The film carefully offers the counterpoint that it can copy itself yet, the Puppet Master answers by offering another point in the movie. One of the Majors own in fact. That copying themselves would not create variety and be risk to total annihilation by a single virus. The Major when asked by Togusa, the new recruit to section 9, why she recruited him answers that he offers diversity which strengthens the time. He has a unique perspective and capability being almost completely non-augmented and with his unique background compared to the rest of the groups. As she says “If we all reacted the same way, we’d be predictable. And there is always more than one way to view a situation” or more succinctly, “Overspecialize and you breed in weakness. Its slow death.” Thus our variety of self, combined with novel consciousness is what marks us and as a sentient species.