ted chiang the lifecycle of software objects

So Chiang’s attitude toward technology, indeed toward the conscious life which produces it, may seem rather grim.

Consequently they develop their own language and independent culture - with unpleasant revelations for their owners. Digients are ‘taught’ by their owners but also teach each other. They can also be installed temporarily in robots and become part of the physical world. The longest tale takes place in a pop-up AI company that has developed a “Neuroblast genome” for a species of virtual creatures called “digients.” Digients are adept at language and learning, and are sold commercially to be nurtured like high-tech Tamagotchis. And the implication? “Civilization now depends on self-deception. So much for the idea of free will and our ability to change the course of universal development. “There’s no way to fool a Predictor.” It works every time. The Predictor is a small hand-held device which accurately anticipates when the owner will activate it by lighting a green LED. Thus the robot’s conclusion: “Some find irony in the fact that a study of our brains revealed to us not the secrets of the past but what ultimately awaits us”Īnother little gem shows the profound but unanticipated consequences of a new high-tech toy. The allusion to our current concerns about global warming is unmistakeable. But in succeeding, he also discovers the inescapable law of increasing entropy that points to the inevitable doom of the robot-civilisation. In the title story, which takes place in a world of robots who are effectively immortal, one daring individual seeks to uncover the source of his consciousness within his own mechanism. Everything has been programmed from the beginning. So “past and future are the same, and we cannot change either.” Not even that modern dream of time travel can affect our fates. In a tale that could be from the Arabian Nights, the protagonist discovers that “Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry.” Our apparent purposes are just as much a product of the systematic causality of the universe as desert sandstorms and random tragedies. This self-consciousness is the dominant theme throughout Chiang’s stories. The idea of predestination is simultaneously an intellectual triumph and a spiritual dead-end - mind realising its own impotence and unimportance. Our ambitions, choices, and persistence are in vain. It doesn’t matter what we know, our fate has already been fixed. This is the inherent irony of the universe. The cost of awareness is the knowledge of inevitability, including the inevitability of death.

Ted chiang the lifecycle of software objects