Exhalation by Ted Chiang
These stories will alter the way you think, feel, and perceive the world by addressing some of humanity’s oldest questions as well as brand-new conundrums only he could invent. They represent Ted Chiang as his most insightful, compassionate, and revelatory. Ted Chiang addresses both contemporary problems and some of humanity’s oldest questions.
A time vortex in “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” forces a cloth vendor in ancient Baghdad to consider mistakes from the past and second chances. In “Exhalation,” a scientist from another planet makes a startling discovery that has implications for everyone on the planet. The power to see into other universes calls for a completely fresh analysis of the ideas of choice and free will in “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom.”
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
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It began by discussing automation, particularly future General Intelligence. It speaks of two individuals who were unintentionally combined to create this intelligence: one was a former zookeeper, and the other was a creator of digital prosthetics and animation forms. Chiang is either a fantastic scientist, a brilliant science fiction writer like William Gibson, or just lucky; or possibly all three, given how well his notion of this intelligence fits with what we now know. A software architecture for digital intelligence that can only exist in a complex Digital Earth—a type of virtual environment that is more intricate and comprehensive than anything we currently have—had been developed by some group. The program picks up new skills through use and from interacting with people.
In contrast to the Deep Learning infants that concentrate on Go or other digital games, they cannot accelerate their learning at their own pace because they rely on humans in real-time, which makes them learn very slowly. In this method, producing adults requires a lot of time and work.
The product and its intelligence forms are popular at first, and many, many people use them to help their children learn; however, after a while, the intrinsic reward of developing a digital intelligence declines, and the difficulty of constantly engaging these “children” wears out everyone but a select few.
Of course, our heroes are among the select few, and although they sort of develop feelings for one another, they unquestionably develop feelings for their creations. Ana takes care of one Jax, while Derek looks after two different versions of the same digital life form known as Marco and Polo. Jax and Ana briefly express their love for one another, however, it is just platonic because Jax lacks genitalia.
The difficulty is that the sterile digital environment that the digients live in is also dying from lack of interaction, and the digients are growing weary of it. The human “parents” of the digients try to move their “children” into new digital worlds, but they are overwhelmed by the cost and technological difficulty. A corporation that provides love and sex offers to meet their requirements by suggesting they make their sex partners from different iterations of the digient “children.”
Some of the digients are no longer children after twenty years and are anxious to experience the possibilities of adult life, including sex. Derek agrees to let his “children” join since he still longs for Eva. Ana, who is madly in love with Jax, cannot bear to think of Jax in any way connected to anybody else.
