I'm not sure. I'm not an expert on this, but I'll have fun making an educated guess. Looking at the list of options for psychosurgery, I think you can create "good" citizens without wiping out memories. Just edit behavior, emotions, and personality. In fact, the memories could be used in a way to reinforce their "good" citizen condition. "I used to be a terrible person, but the docs fixed that. I would use them again. If you have any problems, I would recommend you go give them a visit. Tell them I sent you.". Actual loss of ego might be side effects of psychosurgery gone bad, botched, and/or safeties ignored. A person can suffer stress damage and trauma because of a mishaps when doing psychosurgery. That said, I'm not sure if the old personality traits of the "good" citizen will be retained. Depending of the methods used, they could strip away old personality traits and insert new ones. You might need to craft new personality traits for the individual, hopefully close to what the person had before. Hopefully the person remembers what they were like. Alternatively, the old personality traits might be retained as an old bad habits. You just need to strip away the old "good" citizen habits and ease the old habits back into dominance.

Well, psychosurgery is almost always done in a simulspace environment or some other system where you basically have access to a digital representation of the Ego. So not having access to an earlier version of the Ego to roll back to if you fuck something up is probably reserved for idiots and uncaring antagonists. That said, RAW I don't think there's a way to specifically "undo" psychosurgery edits. Once you pick up Edited Memories or Modified Behavior, I'm not sure you can then at a later date scrub those out. That would almost assuredly be a house rule - probably having to basically do the proceedure in reverse, and unless you had a backup copy of the Ego to base it on, it's not like you'd actually have a copy of their memories to replace missing or edited ones with. Modified Behavior is kind of hit or miss, but you could probably just un-snap the blocks/pushes on whatever behaviors and they'd go back to whatever is a nominal operation for them, just finding and removing them safely is the trick. High level mods are probably obvious but hard to work on, but low level ones are probably hard to catch unless you've done a thorough diagnosis or heard from the patient. Keep in mind, several psychosurgery procedures wear off after a period of time or can wear off, reflecting a certain plasticity of the mind, that your Ego and the hardware it runs on can gradually adjust back if you're properly resistant.

You know what probably likes being robots... robots. Its a simple enough task to make ALIs that like doing work (or be indifferent about it). You don't need people to be turned into robots. There are already plenty of types of robots. They're also easily built and takes less time to build than to edit people using psychosurgery. Perhaps the only good reason why you would use people as robots instead of ALIs as robots is that people don't have the same limitations that ALIs do. They can have active skills higher than 40, can default skills, learn new skills, can be sleeved into biomorphs, and so on. Of course, the reason why ALIs have limitations is to not be able to out compete people and not be able to turn on their masters easily (for whatever reason that might be). The way I see it, trying to edit people to be robots is in effect to trying to sneak around the limitations of ALIs. Or you want actual slaves for some reason (and ALIs are not people enough to satisfy you). It also robs people of their transhumanity and agency (ability to make their own decisions about their life). I think you are better off making better ALIs. Less controversy. ---- As for restoring the edited people, that can be tricky to work around. Yes it is bad to turn the people into robots, but is also bad to restore the robots back into people? They might actually resist such efforts and may have programed loyalty to the people or group that made them that way. I'm not sure I have a good answer for that. I'm against leaving them the way they are, in such a way that would somehow justify the perpetrator's position or leave the perpetrators better off. So maybe restore the people robots enough so they no longer forced to be loyal to their masters. Maybe even despise their former masters. Also people have backups just in case something does go wrong (such as death or addiction problem), so I'm inclined to restore them further than just restoring agency. If they have good backups (uncorrupted by the perpetrators), I would want to talk the backups first before doing anything. As for bad people who were turned into good robots, well, transhumanity does total deletion of egos from time to time as punishment for very bad crimes. I might want to talk to some other people to figure out what I should do. I think I would create a lot of bad will if I acted too hastily and alone on this issue.

Replacing memories lost would, I would say, be impossible short of having the full experience playback of those memories to reinsert, probably from a fork who was not edited (though in that case, you have a fork...) or recorded for posterity. Undoing [i]behavioral modification[/i] changes, though, should be possible - tricky, but possible.

Has anyone used an exsurgent psychosurgeon as a villain yet? This thread's starting to make me think I should throw one into the next game I run.

It's kind of pushing things to say Eclipse Phase is truely post-scarcity. Energy limits still exist, and elemental shortages are all over the place. (H2O on Luna, gasses in the inner system, heavy elements in the outer system, antimatter everywhere, etc). There'd be no need to trade between planets if post-scarcity was achieved. IMO Eclipse Phase is still "scarce", but has near optimal resource exploitation and efficiency. Fork-crews might also have groupthink issues and have trouble attacking problems from multiple directions and viewpoints. That could be a reason to have a neurally-diverse work force. You also don't really gain anything from forking one person instead of hiring multiple, unless you don't intend to pay the forks.