Book Review of The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang
There's a story in academia about what academics do with complex issues that lack a good definition. The question is: Which department should deal with this issue?
Generally, for less complex issues that do have a good definition, it's fairly easy to identify a department (or group of departments) that are willing to take on said issue.
If the issue is ill-defined, it usually goes to the Philosophy department. They're in charge of defining an issue well enough so it can be handed off to other departments.
However, sometimes even the Philosophy department is at a loss for ideas that might be used to cope with an issue. In these cases, the issue is often handed off to the English department, especially to the faculty who deal with literary criticism.
The professors of literary criticism who handle the wildest issues have to be the ones that deal with science fiction.
My guess is that the author of this article - Danny Crichton - is a professor of literary criticism who deals with science fiction. His book review below deals with a new book by Ted Chiang: The Lifecycle of Software Objects.
The book uses the advance of Artifical General Intelligence to address this age old question: What does it mean to be a person?
The book is mostly about what it might be like to raise a Child AI. So, I've listed this article in my blog post: The Idea of creating a Child AI.
Review of The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang
With the development of generalized AI, what’s the meaning of a person?
The TechCrunch book club reads Ted Chiang’s Lifecycle of Software Objects
by Danny Crichton
February 16, 2020
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/16/with-the-development-of-generalized-ai-whats-the-meaning-of-a-person/
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This is a much more sprawling story than the earlier short stories in Exhalation, with much more of a linear plot than the fractal koans we experienced before. That wider canvas offers us an enormous buffet of topics to discuss, from empathy, the meaning of humanity, and the values we vouch for to artificial entities, the economics of the digital future, and onwards to the futures of romance, sex, children, and death. I have pages of notes from this story, but we can’t cover it all, so I want to zoom in on just two threads that I found particularly deep and rewarding.
One core objective of this story is to really interrogate the meaning of a “person.” Chiang sets up our main character Ana as a mother of a digital entity (a “digient”) who was a zookeeper in a past life. That career history gives us a nice framing: it allows us via Ana to compare humans to animals, and therefore to contextualize the personhood debate around the digients throughout the story.
"""
References
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Beshears, Fred
The idea of creating a Child AI
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