The Night We Became People Again Allora Calzadilla
President Obama's summer 2019 reads.
It'due south an incredible - yet apparent - collection of highly original, profound stories of the personal and societal implications of future tech. From a iii-page snippet to a 100-page novella, they explore humanity's relationship with technology and hence ourselves: scientific discipline, literacy, parallel and culling worlds, faith, and
President Obama's summer 2019 reads.
Information technology'southward an incredible - yet apparent - collection of highly original, profound stories of the personal and societal implications of future tech. From a three-folio snippet to a 100-page novella, they explore humanity's relationship with engineering science and hence ourselves: scientific discipline, literacy, parallel and alternative worlds, organized religion, and free will.
You can't fault the writing, but you don't read for lyricism, pithy quotes, and deep characterisation. You read for the encephalon-twisting mind-expansion.
Notation: The individual reviews are in spoiler tags for like shooting fish in a barrel scrolling; they don't contain plot spoilers.
The Merchant and the Alchemist'due south Gate, four* Traditional sci-fi writers tackle the mechanics and paradoxical consequences of time travel. They include futuristic infinite-faring, alien planets, and exotic lifeforms. Chiang takes a theological, philosophical, alchemical arroyo, and sets it on Earth, hundreds of years ago. Sit comfortably and submit to the tangled enchantment of a matryoshka-like story with an ancient, mythical tone. See, hear, and touch the buzz of a Baghdad bazaar long ago. Wander, wonder, and ponder. This has a moral, merely does not preach. It might be a tale of Scheherazade. Framing Story "My middle was troubled, and neither the purchase of luxuries nor the giving of alms was able to soothe it. At present I stand before you without a single dirham in my purse, simply I am at peace." A penniless human tells his story to a mighty caliph. Middle Layer His story begins when he entered the store of a metalsmith, where he found wares more varied, exotic, and fine than he had ever seen ("an astrolabe equipped with seven plates inlaid with silver, a water-clock that chimed on the hr, and a nightingale made of contumely that sang when the current of air blew"). The owner chatted and and so took him to a back room, where he told three fantastic stories, all relating to knowledge, understanding, and acceptance of the by and the future: free will versus destiny - the will of Allah. The "alchemy" of which the metalsmith spoke is a time portal. "He offered an caption, speaking of his search for tiny pores in the pare of reality, like the holes that worms diameter into wood, and how upon finding one he was able to expand and stretch it the mode a glassblower turns a dollop of molten drinking glass into a long-necked pipe, and how he and so allowed time to menses similar water at 1 rima oris while causing it to thicken like syrup at the other." Three More Stories The metalsmith's tales are of those who used his gate: The Fortunate Rope Maker, The Weaver Who Stole From Himself, and The Married woman and Her Lover. All of life is here: treasure, travel, dearest, loss, robbers, deceit, disguise, and cede. There is guilt, repentance, atonement, and forgiveness. "That is all, but that is enough." What Does it Mean? Chiang does confront paradoxes, but not the "What if I kill my grandpa?" kind. He drills into the human psyche and soul. And the deeper he goes, the more pleasingly tangled the knots in the dorsum of the tapestry go. "Past and hereafter are the aforementioned, and nosotros cannot change either, simply know them more fully. My journey to the by had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything." Links There are echoes of way, setting, and tone of JL Borges' stories. See my review HERE. Telling a wondrous story to a great man reminded of Calvino's Invisible Cities, which I reviewed Hither. (hide spoiler)]
Nested stories of portals to culling lives, like a Tale of Arabian Knights.
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"Coincidence and intention are ii sides of a tapestry, my lord. Yous may find ane more amusing to look at, but y'all cannot say one is truthful and the other is false." 
Prototype: Forepart and back of tapestry cushion depicting Esther and Ahasuerus (N Netherlands, 1650-80 - so wrong culture and wrong catamenia!) (Source.)
Exhalation, 4* Self-awareness is a fundamental attribute of intelligent life, only the converse is more than unsettling: conscious intelligence that does non fit our usual definition of "life". The narrator challenges the assumption that air is the source of life and investigates that, and the mystery of memory, in a shocking, risky, and very personal experiment. This challenges readers' assumptions nigh the narrator (who and what they are), besides equally the readers themselves (what makes us human). Information technology's also a metaphor for pollution and climate change, forth with the panic or denial that tin can arise from realising the inevitability of expiry (as individuals, or life as we know it). Thus, information technology leads naturally to the next story in the collection, What's Expected of Us. "Fifty-fifty if a universe'south life span is calculable, the multifariousness of life that is generated within information technology is not… None of them could have been predicted, because none of them was inevitable." (hide spoiler)]
A dangerously literal sort of introspection.
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"Contemplate the curiosity that is being, and rejoice that you are able to do so."
What's Expected of U.s., v* Tin you force yourself to believe something? If a simple device proved free-volition didn't exist, would there be whatever purpose in living? Perhaps: people whose choices are highly constrained, whether by imprisonment or severe disability, are not mostly suicidal. Three thought-provoking pages reminded me of a Monty Python sketch about the danger of the funniest joke in the globe (and when I read Chiang's notes, I learnt he'd had that in heed), but this story is sadder and less funny, but also more profound: Meet a later story in the collection, Omphalos, for a very dissimilar take on costless volition. (hide spoiler)]
Without gratis will, would life lose all meaning?
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"The reality isn't of import; what'south of import is your conventionalities."
Text of sketch: Hither.
Video of sketch: Here.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects, iv* A zookeeper-cum-primatologist is recruited past a software company to work with an animator to develop digients for the game world, Data Earth: engaging, and realistic, only without broaching Uncanny Valley. They can be bred and trained. Nature and nurture affect them: is it wrong to fail or actively abuse a digient? Possibly it depends in part on how much free will they have to consent, and also how witting they are as beings. What if they developed their ain civilization? Over the years, the tech improves (digients in robot bodies interact in the existent world), but changes in consumer tastes, information markets, and the wider economy affect evolution in unexpected ways. This story is fundamentally about human relationships with intelligent technology. There'due south research exploring the same idea from the other side: Only: (hibernate spoiler)]
What if Tamagotchis evolved and interacted for decades, into full AIs, with emotions?
Image: Tamagotchi (Source.)
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This broad-ranging, thoughtful novella's but (slight) disappointment was a rather anticlimactic end.
"If you give someone a 3D head-mounted display… and "beam" her into a robot's trunk so she sees the earth from its perspective, you can change her attitude toward it."
Robot rights and corruption - on Vox.com
"Empathizing with robots risks actually reducing our empathy for people."
And that's the footing of the adjacent story in the collection, Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny.
Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny, iv* The results are broadly predictable; the detail less and then. Meet Robot rights and abuse - on Vox.com, and the previous story in the collection, The Lifecycle of Software Objects (hide spoiler)]
Machines do the work we don't want to, oftentimes better and faster. Brand them engaging and lifelike, and we can grow fond of them likewise. Nothing to lose, right?
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A Victorian inventor devises an "automatic nanny", as a assistance, rather than replacement. He believes "rational child-rearing will atomic number 82 to rational children", unhindered by excessive emotional involvement of parents. Harry Harlow's maternal separation studies sprang to listen.
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling, v*
"When y'all larn to read you volition be built-in over again...and you volition never be quite so alone again."
Rumer Godden
Ii stories, separated by centuries and continents, explore the ramifications of becoming literate versus the consequences of being deskilled past technology, for individuals and societies. Both technologies change how people call back, human action, and procedure the word and the world, and neither are inherently forces for ease or proficient. "The sounds a person made while speaking wee as smooth and unbroken as the hide of a goat's leg, but the words [on the page] were like the basic underneath the meat." Both threads explore the importance of remembering and forgetting; the divergence betwixt two types of truth: what's right (true in spirit) and what'southward clinically accurate; the relative importance of personal experience over documentary evidence, and the temptation to bear witness i's right over admitting when one's wrong. Be kind, don't rewind? This happens already: when y'all unearth former photos, videos, letters, or school reports. Having history rewritten is unsettling, especially as information technology's likely to be at times of upheaval, such every bit going through the possessions of a loved i who has died. (hide spoiler)]
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In the near future thread, people can outsource their memory to lifelogs (audio and video), ultimately becoming cognitive cyborgs.
Far abroad, Jijingi, aged 13, is taught to read by a missionary - the just person in his hamlet who can.
Revisiting happy events would be a joy, and trying to bank check facts to settle an statement hard to resist. Merely there would exist painful memories every bit well. And sometimes, one would discover 1's memory did not friction match the "facts".
The Swell Silence, 4* "'Aspiration' ways both hope and the human activity of breathing… I speak, therefore I am." (hide spoiler)]
The title relates to The Fermi Paradox: if the universe is and then vast and then former, we are surely not the merely intelligent life, so why can't nosotros observe it?
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Perchance the problem is that nosotros wouldn't recognise it if we saw it – like the dolphins in Douglas Adams' So Long, and Thank you for All the Fish.
The opposite of the title of the story collection.
Omphalos, four* "The Church building has always been able to derive strength from the evidence when it'south useful and ignore information technology when information technology'due south not." That's not ever true for individuals: there'south a crisis of faith and consideration of free will in a different way from the earlier story in the drove, What's Expected of U.s.. (hide spoiler)]
"What if the unabridged practice of science is founded on a false premise?"
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This is a world where young earth creationism is true. Unlike the vocal believers online, these people believe the Bible and scientific discipline, because Chiang has twisted the physics, cosmology, and anthropology to fit. In the most ancient tree fossils, the rings merely stop at the betoken of creation, and the oldest mummies have no navels, because they were created (omphalos is principal/first species). Here, "humanity was the reason for creation", and scientists have the most reason to believe.
Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom, 4* Minor scams include a grey market for second-hand Prisms, dubious information brokers, and insurance adverts targetting people just earlier they have an accident. The main scam is bigger and relies on an ingenious use of two Prisms, simultaneously. It'southward the bug raised by the device that interested me. Similar the lifelogs in The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling, the temptation to view is huge. Chiang envisages many uses: positive (collaborating with i's paraself and reaping the full rewards in both branches), neutral ("what if?" therapy, or a widow getting social media updates of a para-husband who survived), and ultimately destructive, leading to jealousy, self-doubt, and an identity crisis. Prisms are neutral, just addict support groups and the crime thread demonstrate the attraction and danger of the dark side. Flutterby The short story that is often said to have given rise to The Butterfly Upshot is Ray Bradbury'southward The Sound of Thunder Encounter my review HERE. "If the aforementioned matter happens in different branches where you lot acted differently, and then you aren't the cause." (hibernate spoiler)]
A futuristic device is used for complex criminal ends.
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The sci-fi aspect concerns Prisms, which are used to communicate with one's paraself, from a unlike branch of many worlds. Information technology'due south similar a shared notepad from a betoken of divergence, with express pages. When it'due south used upward, at that place's no style to reconnect.
This suggests a time traveller wouldn't demand to impale Hitler: just disturbing an oxygen molecule a month earlier his formulation could alter everything. (But it might not!)
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41160292-exhalation
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