There is no feasible way Torbjorn could have made the AI for the omnic’s super advancements and self aware sentience. Sure he deisgned their original bodies and husks, but you mean to tell me this little engineer created such powerful ai? There is 3 ways the omnics could have truly come about.
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It was an accident
This is clearly the most boring conclusion. Torbjorn just accidentally changed a 1 to a 0 and now super advanced ai beyond anything we have ever seen. Seems farfetched, if he was using the on market ai then they would already have a set programmed systems. We know not all ai became omnic because Hamster still uses one of those old ai for his mech. (its not spreading like a virus either)
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Torbjorn got help from someone
This seems like the most likely scenario. Torbjorn is an engineer who shows no prowess with ai to such a degree that he probably received help from someone more experienced in the matter. Torbjorn blames himself for the creation of the Omnics but I have a suspicion there is a missing piece to the puzzle. As for this mysterious programmer, his absence from the game could be answered because either he went into hiding or ended his life after what his creations did. I mean Torbjorn can only live with himself because he didn’t actually make the ai.
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Torbjorn used a secret prototype ai
I personally like this theory a lot since its the most interesting and would explain why the more the omnics evolve the more alien they appear. The omnics from the D.Va short Shooting Star literally looks like metal corruptors from SC2.
Torbjorn probably used a secret government ai which was reversed engineered from alien technology implanted on existing human ai. It explaines the strange language, the weird eldritch like god programs, the hightened awareness and rapid sentience.
Thanks for reading my crazy theories on how the Omnics came about.
Torbjorn didn’t literally make all the omnics. He had input on their designs but not their A.I.
His hero profile:
Before the Omnic Crisis, Torbjörn had gained notoriety for designing weapons systems used by countries around the world. However, his belief that technology must serve a better vision for humanity put him at odds with his employers, who desired to control his weapons using networked computer intelligence.
Torbjörn had a deep mistrust of sentient robotic intelligence, and while many of his peers wrote this off as paranoia, his worst fears were realized when the robot populations of the world turned against their human creators during the Omnic Crisis.
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In the computer field, it is common to have multiple individuals working on different parts of a computer system. Torbjörn is really knowledgeable when it comes to being a craftsman, blacksmith, etc. He’s not a computer programmer, and any AI logic likely came from a different source other than Torb. It’s like any computer system. You can have a build where Corsair builds the case, MSI builds the motherboard, Intel provides the processor, AMD provides the GPU, and so on and so forth. I’m not sure if it’s ever been disclosed who the author is of the omnics’ AI, but I’d imagine there would be multiple programmers designing the AI so they can add their own touch and personality to the robot. The only example I can think of is Orisa’s creator (Eefie or something?), but who knows how many AI’s she has built.
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I think a better argument for your case might be the fact that Torbjorn was what, late teens when the omnics we’re being developed?
Yeah, we don’t really the timeline that well, but we can calculate the approx age. And it’s young.
He’s 57 currently. The Omnic Crisis broke out ~30 years ago. That would put him at 27 at the start of the crisis - he could have easily worked on the omnics in his 20s in the 5 years before the crisis started (we don’t know how long omnics were around before the crisis).
Yeah, that’s incredibly young to become a prominent enough engineer and to have a big enough impact on the whole deal to then be included I to special force team as an authority on the matter. I’m talking about him being the only civilian in OG Overwatch, supposedly to help with omnics because he had a hand in building them.
Yeah, he was also a weapons guy, but it doesn’t seem like that was the reason he was included.
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That is at the start of crisis, I’d say he’d need several years at the very least to work. Not to mention that the omnics didn’t rebel immediately after their “release date”.
he admits to having enough blood for a lifetime so i doubt this. he learned to live with his mistake. Mind you, he suffered from his own creation since he lost his arm
27 is actually pretty young. Probably out in such a technical workforce for only a couple of years since he’s probably formally educated. This game has never had ages that made a ton of sense though.
The ages make sense when you realize several of these people are prodigies/geniuses who achieved greatness at a younger age than their peers.
It doesn’t make sense for so much of the cast to be child prodigies. They do it that way because they want them to be mostly young and hot. They have a few older looking folks, mostly middle aged looking, because it makes sense to have some. But they want the majority of the cast to kick butt and look good doing it. Heck a lot of the older ones look younger than they are.
Which makes sense, it’s a video game with a talking gorilla. It doesn’t need to be realistic.
Not really worth thinking about the ages too hard and just roll with it.
Torbjorn is a weapons designer and cyberneticist. He can make mechanical limbs and remarkable implements of destruction, but as far as designing omnic software, he’s very much out of the game. The Ironclad Guild that Torbjorn was working with seems to have collaborated with Omnica (and the early Helix Security International, if the Defense Matrix skin indicates anything) to engineer the Bastion units, with Sven from the “Destroyer” comic likely having a hand in their AI and deployment routines. But Torbjorn’s only relevant talent in this respect is hardware and ballistics design. He physically made the omnics, but he clearly was not on board with them being programmed with such intelligence.
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Efi is the Shuri to Torbjorn’s Tony Stark. Both are brilliant, but child prodigies are probably more common and seen as more successful than their predecessors because children, in nurturing and educating conditions, haven’t yet suppressed their imagination, effort or drive. For all it’s worth, Efi’s biggest contribution to Orisa’s success was Fortify- the Supercharger and Halt! technologies already existed, with presumably only minor modifications made by Oladele. All she had to do was then install this in a refurbished OR15, and BOOM. Orisa. In the day and age of common omnic intelligence, it wouldn’t be hard to program a modulating AI. Fortify really seems to be the first innovation here, and given that it has a green glow like the graviton charge Orisa utilizes, it may be using gravity-increasing stabilizers to hold her in place, while temporarily stiffening the armor to resist crushing from such conditions being introduced.
On the subject of why there are so many prodigies in Overwatch:
Overwatch hired the exceptional. It was a deliberate collection of amazing, talented, next-level people. Just being good wouldn’t have been good enough to beat a horde of gun-toting computers who are out for human blood.
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