Wait... The Reapers would likely have similar technology, unless it went full HFY.
Maybe that's what they mean by each of them being a nation and preserving organics, that each contains a Grid hosting the minds of the species it was made from?
I imagine so, it's just that they use the messy goopification method of digitising living beings instead of good clean and efficient lasers.
That being said though, since the Reapers are more or less Paperclip Maximisers with the goal of PRESERVE SENTIENT LIFE AT ALL COSTS set to max, their version of the grid is likely a zoo of some kind or a permanent formaldehyde prison. The biggest problem with life is that it's alive. That which is dead may never die, Ia Ia Cthulhu Fthagn etc.
That being said, I figure the Reapers are also the answer the Tron's biggest questions; what if the MCP or CLU had won?
You basically get an AI that has a single goal in complete control of a system. The MCP valued control above all else. Humans are an uncontrollable element; it would have turned against humanity in your bog standard Skynet scenario. CLU on the other hand valued perfection. Humans aren't exactly perfect, and thus you would have had the same situation arising for different reasons. In the case of the Reapers, the Starbrat is their version of CLU or the MCP. There was no Leviathan Kevin Flynn to stop it. The Starbrat represents order and control, which it views as absolutely necessary towards preserving sentient life at all costs.
Contrast this with the grid as envisioned by Flynn, an open system, a living world with deep connections between physical and digital reality. If Reapers represent the order and control required to preserve sentient life, then the grid and Flynn's vision represents the freedom and perhaps even the chaos it needs to flourish like it never has before.
To put it in basic terms, Grid-tan wants to be your waifu, while Reaper-tan is an isolating type yandere with unlimited power.
And now that you can't get that image out of your head, a few more thoughts.
In my prior post I ruminated about population at a natural rate of growth. Emphasis on the word natural here. In Legacy Flynn created a copy of himself and called him CLU, but it was fairly clear from the get go that he was a program through and through. Still, there's no real reason he couldn't have a perfect clone of himself other than "I'm not touching that ethical problem with a barge pole". If ethics go out the window, there's no reason you can't just clone all the humans you want from a simple copy/paste command.
Of course, that's completely and totally bullshit. For one, I figure nobody would sign off on that, ever, if they had the choice, and no government would either, if they hadn't banned it outright from the get go. Things do get a bit tricky when it comes to programs though. They need to be able to be copied and pasted as needed in order to even function, so I figure that would get grandfathered in, and that in turn basically gives you loads and loads of programs to draw from, which in turn means you can have all the medics, soldiers, expert technicians, or <<Insert Desired Profession Here>> that you could ask for.
I figure this could be balanced out as most programs being essentially rote performers of their task (BASICS) with only a few capable of innovation, learning and so on (WISE). Most programs are BASIC. They do their thing and aren't very much good for anything outside that task, soldiers, troopers and various others are essentially BASIC. If you know that the Light Trooper is going to throw in a left hook, just like the five other guys before him, then you can easily counter his move and eliminate him because he's a rote fighter.
Tron on the other hand, and programs like him of course, are WISE programs. They can innovate, learn, and do things that other programs can only dream of. They blur the line between User and Program for this reason, and leads into my next point.
ISO's. If conditions are right in the grid, this spontaneously produces ISO's, digital life made manifest in the human form. It's hard to tell if they're human, alien, artificial life form, or something else entirely. Perhaps they're the end product of what WISE programs had. They were complex, intelligent, wise, perhaps a bit naive and if Quorra was any indication, human to the core. Hmm. Perhaps they're the bridge between humanity and program? I also figure that humans and ISO's can age and die, but Programs are immortal until derezzed, which would be another fundamental difference that sets them apart. It also serves as a bridge between the settings. Tron is still around, and he still fights for the user.
All of this of course would send heads in Citadel space spinning. At this point you kind of have to ask what the hell an AI is when you can have programs pop out of friend computer, to say nothing of the Geth. The way I see it, as intimated in my earlier Reaper example, an AI is essentially a CLU or MCP that's acting out in the physical world. They have no convenient digitisers to begin their invasion, so they're lashing out the only way that they can.
The Geth are a bit different. Because of the quirk in how they were programmed and how their intelligence evolved, they're essentially an aggregate of BASIC programs that, when acting in concert, can give rise to emergent WISE behaviour. The more programs working together, the more WISE behaviour they can partake in. Put enough Geth in an area and you might even generate Geth ISO's under the right conditions. Geth ISO's would effectively be their end goal, and would likely be what Legion gained in canon if you saved the Geth in ME3.
So, yeah. Council reaction would likely be to shit many bricks until a lot of stuff gets clarified or sorted out. Eventually the Citadel has to begin adopting this technology for their own use, and I really do mean that they have to, if they don't want to be completely outclassed in the coming years. With grid technology, humans, even if you discount their population factor, can plan, research, and manufacture everything faster than the Citadel could ever hope, transport vastly more goods at the barest fractions of their costs. It'd be like a stone age society trying to fight an information age one in terms of sheer manpower, industrial output, military might and so on. Anyone that fails to adopt grid tech for themselves is rapidly outpaced and absorbed by those that do. It takes the book of civilisation and throws it out the window, then starts a new book in digital format.
I figure that out of the council species, the salarians will likely have the highest rate of adoption, followed by the turians and the asari. Salarians get an especially good deal, given their much shorter lifespans, and would probably have the highest percentage of their population go digital out of the non-human species, set to overtake humans by the end of the century. They'd likely start using programs as proxies to physical reality, perhaps even legalise limited digital cloning of individuals. Of course, this assumes that aging hasn't been nixed entirely already. It's likely that salarian systems produce a higher amount of WISE and ISO type programs in comparison to human systems.
The turians would be idiots not to see the benefits of grid technology. It cuts down on training times, gives them access to immense amounts of personnel in the form of programs and potential ISO's, it boosts manufacturing, practically eliminates logistics, the list goes on. The asari are a bit of a mixed bag. They're probably the most hesitant to take to grid tech on the basis of the teleport problem, and the lengthier lifespan is not as attractive since a thousand years is quite a lot to work with anyway. Of course, anyone who wants more than a thousand years will still jump at this. Generally, I'd say that the societies more open to innovation and change are going to benefit from this a lot more than the entrenched and conservative ones, who will quickly find themselves increasingly irrelevant in the face of an increasingly rapidly changing galaxy.
