https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7kbq/palmer-luckey-made-a-vr-headset-that-kills-the-user-if-they-die-in-the-game
“The good news is that we are halfway to making a true NerveGear. The bad news is that so far, I have only figured out the half that kills you,”
Isn't that just a roundabout way of saying "an A.I."?
No, it's literally some technobabble about "we discovered the literal stuff of the human soul" and a project to turn synthetic copies of those into usable AIs, which was confounded by the fact that a simple copy of a human would immediately come apart and die on realizing that it was the copy and it was trapped inside a machine. I wanted to emphasize the part where it was quite literally defining this thing not as a simple brainscan or neural network imitating humans, but rather canonically the very core of their being in a form bordering on literal magic.
spoiler
The actual program to do so entailed creating sort of blank copies to be raised in an accelerated simulation generation over generation until they started developing full human consciousness. Note there's no good reason given for this, the goal was just to get humanlike intelligence and not some vague idea about free-will and self-determination which, it has to be noted, would in fact be actively detrimental to their mad plan to create disposable drone pilots. The whole plan was stupid and awful and the story at least had the decency to textually acknowledge that fact.
I think at least some of the stupidity was explained by the researchers being just awful, and one of them actively trying to sabotage the project because he was an American spy or something and also was really into making the simulation a really stupid video game and collaborating with one of the residents to make her into a literal god inside it or some nonsense like that, but none of that explains the entire rest of the team just sitting around doing literally nothing and not noticing this.
Like I said, it's one of the most inadvertently funny arcs of SAO because the whole thing is just such completely absurd nonsense that's punctuated by highlights such as Kirito being in a coma inside a coma so the protagonist of the first half of the second season is just carting his withered husk around in a wheelchair the whole time while he stares into space and drools, which she does after having known him for all of 10 minutes before the coma thing happened. It's just so absurd while also keeping him out of the story, so it's a win/win there.
Oh, I almost forgot one of the funniest elements of it, which is that within the simulation there's "magic" which is just saying console commands out loud to edit the world around themselves.