The official story is servitor units gone rogue.
The actual story is... complex. Part emerging machine intelligence, part programming failures and part personality engrams.
The first Boomers were cleverly programmed to provide the neural net with baseline instructions. However, it was a sizable programming overhead burden because for them to function in any reasonable timespan their programming needed to be very specifically tailored to their hardware and tasking. It could be done, mind, but it did mean that they generally had very narrow competencies and unpredictable and potentially dangerous reactions to unexpected instructions. Personalities, if any develop, tend to be very innocent; not in the sense that they don't want to do harm, but in the sense that they don't and often can't conceive of the consequences.
Enter the mind upload technology, which covers most of the flaws in the programming by providing Boomers with greater mental flexibility. Sure, what engrams GENOM has are at best incomplete, and often deliberately altered after the fact to get any sense of identity out of them. This is not a good thing, because it makes the engram unstable; one of the reasons Boomers go through maintenance is so that their programming (and engrams) can be reset to factory specifications, and some form of violent psychosis if maintenance isn't done properly is common. But they've found that using the brain scans of people who worked the job the Boomer's meant to replace give better results, if not necessarily more stable ones, depending on a number of factors including the mental health of the people that were scanned.
Given that military Boomers do military jobs and the sort of veterans that won't be missed are the sort of veterans to be suffering from PTSD among other issues military Boomers are... volatile, as are many other Boomers meant for jobs were violence and high stress environments are likely. Yes, this means that the storage staff Boomers in the back of the shop are very unlikely to go rampant compared to the customer service Boomers.
And then you have the emerging intelligence issue. Boomers that last long enough start to develop a sense of self not that unlike humans. Even Boomers without an engram running in their heads develop a sense of self. This is the other big reason maintenance is required; part of the process involves wiping the undesired personality forming in the Boomer's brain. That doesn't mean that all of the personality is wiped though; Boomer brains are complex neural networks and the sort of maintenance cycle that's needed to fully scrub it clean is just too much effort. This means that plenty of Boomers, already not necessarily with very stable minds running the bodies, regularly get brutalized in ways that are hard to conceive. Some lucky ones end up stable, or at least functional, most go mad.
In a not quite cyberpunk twist, places which don't maintain their Boomers properly but treat them decently have very low incidence rates of Boomer rampages. In a completely genre appropriate twist, maintenance of Boomers is tracked (Boomer rampages are quite dangerous), and if the ADP runs into improperly maintained Boomers they often get confiscated and destroyed as a risk. If you are a Boomer, you just can't win.
The actual story is... complex. Part emerging machine intelligence, part programming failures and part personality engrams.
The first Boomers were cleverly programmed to provide the neural net with baseline instructions. However, it was a sizable programming overhead burden because for them to function in any reasonable timespan their programming needed to be very specifically tailored to their hardware and tasking. It could be done, mind, but it did mean that they generally had very narrow competencies and unpredictable and potentially dangerous reactions to unexpected instructions. Personalities, if any develop, tend to be very innocent; not in the sense that they don't want to do harm, but in the sense that they don't and often can't conceive of the consequences.
Enter the mind upload technology, which covers most of the flaws in the programming by providing Boomers with greater mental flexibility. Sure, what engrams GENOM has are at best incomplete, and often deliberately altered after the fact to get any sense of identity out of them. This is not a good thing, because it makes the engram unstable; one of the reasons Boomers go through maintenance is so that their programming (and engrams) can be reset to factory specifications, and some form of violent psychosis if maintenance isn't done properly is common. But they've found that using the brain scans of people who worked the job the Boomer's meant to replace give better results, if not necessarily more stable ones, depending on a number of factors including the mental health of the people that were scanned.
Given that military Boomers do military jobs and the sort of veterans that won't be missed are the sort of veterans to be suffering from PTSD among other issues military Boomers are... volatile, as are many other Boomers meant for jobs were violence and high stress environments are likely. Yes, this means that the storage staff Boomers in the back of the shop are very unlikely to go rampant compared to the customer service Boomers.
And then you have the emerging intelligence issue. Boomers that last long enough start to develop a sense of self not that unlike humans. Even Boomers without an engram running in their heads develop a sense of self. This is the other big reason maintenance is required; part of the process involves wiping the undesired personality forming in the Boomer's brain. That doesn't mean that all of the personality is wiped though; Boomer brains are complex neural networks and the sort of maintenance cycle that's needed to fully scrub it clean is just too much effort. This means that plenty of Boomers, already not necessarily with very stable minds running the bodies, regularly get brutalized in ways that are hard to conceive. Some lucky ones end up stable, or at least functional, most go mad.
In a not quite cyberpunk twist, places which don't maintain their Boomers properly but treat them decently have very low incidence rates of Boomer rampages. In a completely genre appropriate twist, maintenance of Boomers is tracked (Boomer rampages are quite dangerous), and if the ADP runs into improperly maintained Boomers they often get confiscated and destroyed as a risk. If you are a Boomer, you just can't win.