Exhalation: Stories
By Ted Chiang
I loved one of these stories so much I didn’t want it to end. It just seemed to get going when the story stopped and I had to invent its future for it. Let me try to describe why I liked it so much. First, it dealt with automation and especially a future General Intelligence. It describes two people accidentally thrown together in creating these intelligences: one a former zoo handler and the other a designer of digital prosthetics and animation forms. The conception of these intelligences is so apt with what we currently know that Chiang is either a terrific scientist, a brilliant interlocutor of science fiction like William Gibson, or just lucky; or maybe all three.
Some group had created a software design for a digital intelligence that can only live in an elaborate Digital Earth, a kind of virtual space more detailed and complete than anything we have now. The software learns from experience and interactions with humans. The interactions bit makes them learn very slowly because they rely on humans in real time and cannot supercharge their learning at their own speed, unlike the Deep learning infants that focus on Go or other digital games. It takes time and much effort to produce adults in this scheme.
At first the product and its intelligence forms are a hit and many, many people adopt them to help them learn; but then the intrinsic reward of creating a digital intelligence subsides and the difficulty of engaging these “children” constantly wearies everyone except a few. Our heroes are of course among the few; and they sort of fall in love with each other; but they certainly fall in love with their creations. Derek cares for variants of the same digital life form (digient) named Marco and Polo; and Ana cares for one Jax. At one point Ana and Jax declare love for each other; but it is not a sensual love, only a platonic one since Jax has no genitalia.
The complication is that the digital world the digients inhabit is dying too from lack of involvement; and the digients are getting bored with its sterility. The human “parents” of the digients try to find a way to move their “children” into new digital worlds but find the expense and technical challenge overwhelming. A love/sex provider company offers to answer their needs with a proposal to create sex partners out of variants of the digient “children”.
Twenty years have passed, and some of the digients are no longer children, but eager to explore the possibilities of adult life, including sex. Derek, who has an unsatisfied longing for Eva, agrees to allow his “children” to enroll. Ana, in love with Jax, cannot stand the thought of a variant of Jax involved with anyone else.
That’s where the short story ends.
There are so many multivariate avenues for its continuation. The story is so well written, I don’t want my half assed variants: I want Chiang’s!
Why do I love this story so much?
First, I think that he is right on about how long a real general intelligence will have to survive to become intelligent. Using some future variant of current neural networks and CNNs, a real digient will need to avoid the pitfalls and misconceptions of human development. It will have to start out believing in all the right things: physics, chemistry, evolution; gravity; AI itself. It cannot have ill defined ideas about gods, magic, and superstitions of all kinds. Those are the big misconceptions; but they have daily implications too: such as that things are solid; the future is unknowable; water is alive; objects have intentions; etc. etc. etc. Chiang doesn’t mention any of this, and that’s ok because he got the big idea right: digients have lots to learn and it will take them many years to get it right. Now, they could have done this on the internet; but as we all know, outside of Wikipedia, the internet is a mess, and personal experience is much better. The world and its experience don’t have all the hmuan biases and misconceptions built into them.
What I really like is something that Chiang doesn’t deal with either, but I think he gets it right: platonic love.
Yes, Jax and Ana; and probably Derek, Marco, and Polo all fall in love but it has nothing to do with sex. Do we all have an idea of what is beautiful? Of course! We build it out of our experience. We love our parents; ourselves, and then a growing body of community around us. We connect our parent’s faces, actions, intentions, etc. with this love. We connect our own faces and actions and intentions with this love. Ditto with out community. Wen we find someone else who correlates with all this, especially the faces and actions, of course we fall in love. Is there a sensual, sexual aspect of this? Of course. But there is also a huge platonic, non-sexual component.
If the digients have an active pattern recognition and classification system, they too will build representations of their “parents” and friends, and those too will become the basis of a platonic but powerful love. Chiang got that right.
Would someone with a powerful platonic affection for someone else, want to steep themselves into the mystery of sexual love? Why not?
How will this sexual attachment between Jax, Marco, Polo, and their new variants work out in the hothouse of sexual exploration that the new company will ask them to explore? This is too fascinating a prospect to let drop. Hopefully Chiang will continue this short story into the future. Will Ana become part of Jax’ sexual exploration once Derek and his cohorts of animators add the necessary genitalia. Will the sensory input from those prosthetics be added in a coherent way to amplify the digients’ intellectual development.
Here Chiang may have made a mistake. He proposes that there is a master reward table that governs the digients’ preferences in a fundamental way. While some sensory rewards are undoubtedly built in: such as the preferences for sweet and complex flavors; or even the fear of red colored strange objects, or snakelike moving things; the more higher order preferences that guide our values and our lives are surely embedded within the cognitive architectures of our knowledge structures; not in anything so simplistic as a basic table of values. But that is something the scientists could discover in their exploration of sexuality; which is the key to the further development of this story. The subtlety and nuance of Ana and Derek’s inhibited relationship makes me believe that Chiang can deal with this faithfully, although more prolific readers of Chiang will know if he has built up complex earthy sexual relationships before.
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Ethics and technology
A typical Ted Chiang story explores some new technology in an ingenious way and ends with an ethical lesson. The first story here, "The Merchant and the Alchemists's Gate," is one of the best, and it involves time travel in ancient Baghdad."The Lifecycle of Software Objects" is about AI with lessons for parenting and the ethical treatment of pets, as well as relationships. "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" explores the possibility that our every action could be recorded and the ethical implications for memory. "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" features a device that creates a link between two worlds that have diverged based on a quantum measurement, and all the ways that people might use and misuse it as they interact with their "paraselves."My favorite of these stories is one of the shortest -- "The Great Silence." It began as a collaborative video installation, and Chiang's standalone text became the short story. A link is made between the search for extraterrestrial life and life on Earth from the perspective of Puerto Rican parrots which are going extinct. The parrots are capable of speech, but will fall silent when they are gone.What I miss from Chiang's first collection, "Stories of Your Life and Others," is the darker side of the human situation. Both "Understand" and "Hell Is the Absence of God" are searing in their depiction of evil. There is nothing like that in "Exhalation" -- the ethical intent is admirable, but the stories seem subdued by comparison. The basic ethical lesson has been expressed by the Dalai Lama: "My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness."This collection is recommended to those who enjoy stories that are ingenious and earnest.
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