I had a hard time getting behind the story for the first fifth of the book–although I have a passing familiarity with online gaming and virtual worlds (and, to Chiang’s credit, a passing familiarity with those things is all you need to understand the story) the initial set-up of the novel I found pretty difficult to relate to (I asked my husband: “Why did they need to hire someone to figure out what food to feed a virtual pet? Didn’t they you know, design the pet?”) A decade is a long time in technology, so ten years sees the development and introduction of new AI technologies, the influence of innovative and/or wealthy tech subcultures, and ethical dilemmas that could hardly have been predicted. The digient’s intelligence grows naturally (that is, via experience) and the book follows the maturation of this particular brand of digient over the course of about a decade. It follows two main characters who work for a software company which produces artificially-intelligent companions called digients. Neither of us had read any Ted Chiang, whose name always pops up in sci fi discussions, so together we read his col lection of excellent short stories, Stories Of Your Life And Others, which I highly recommend.Īt 150 pages, The Lifecycle of Software Objects is the longest of Chiang’s short stories. He has introduced me to a few of his favorite authors and I have grown to appreciate the genre much more over the last few years. I wasn’t much into sci-fi until I met my other half.
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