Ted Chiang's "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" (novella, free): Training AIs takes a lot of time & commitment
Two things here that I'd not noticed in Chiang's fiction so far:
They're like souls; they need to wear a body to interact with their environment. Normally as an avatar in Data Earth; can also move to a physical robot.
This is the story of deep attachment Ana Alvarado & Derek Brooks develop for these digitants; Ana is a former zoo keeper hired to train digitants, Derek builds their digital avatars. They'll keep caring for their pet digitants over many years, long after Blue Gamma has folded up & their original software platform is obsolete.
Download full text from Subterranean Online.
Rating: A.
Related: Stories of Ted Chiang.
- Bits of it, I think somewhere near the middle, made me smile. Humor is something I don't normally associate with Chiang's work.
- Telling style is so much like those supremely annoying serials Star One shows at prime time: mostly characters talking to themselves & thinking things out loud. Some people have called the style of this story "descriptive" or "concept driven". May be I'd not noticed it in his fiction so far; may be I've seen too much bad TV recently. I won't call it boring - in fact, it quite interesting at many places; but it took me over a dozen sittings to finish.
Story summary.
A company called Blue Gamma has invented potentially super-intelligent software AIs ("digients"). They're like human babies living in Data Earth, a virtual world (eventually, their alien cousins will also exist on Data Mars).They're like souls; they need to wear a body to interact with their environment. Normally as an avatar in Data Earth; can also move to a physical robot.
This is the story of deep attachment Ana Alvarado & Derek Brooks develop for these digitants; Ana is a former zoo keeper hired to train digitants, Derek builds their digital avatars. They'll keep caring for their pet digitants over many years, long after Blue Gamma has folded up & their original software platform is obsolete.
Fact sheet.
First published: as an independent book by Subterranean Press in 2010.Download full text from Subterranean Online.
Rating: A.
Related: Stories of Ted Chiang.
2 comments:
Cool, Ive heard good things about this author, and this story in particular was mentioned on a SFF forum.
He's may be the best of current crop of genre authors. But his output is low - just a dozen odd stories over as many (or more) years, all of them short fiction. Most of his fiction is online; one that gets most talked about is "Story of Your Life".
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