charles_cbcpl 's review for:

The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang

4.0

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In this novella, Chiang’s characters experience the ups and downs of raising an artificial intelligence. The owners of the artificial beings begin as employees of a company that sells them as virtual-world pets, but when the company fails, they choose not to suspend their charges and complicated questions begin to emerge around the "personhood" of the maturing beings. The large weakness of this well-crafted story is that very little happens in terms of human drama. One could hang an entire novel on the framework of the plot and the philosophical questions it engenders, but the human story is stretched too thin to offer the poignancy that this novella deserves.