The Lifecycle of Hype Cycles

This is one of the craziest scifi books I've ever read. I am totally swallowed-up by it, but I feel like someone in the 1950's reading about nuclear energy and space travel -- it's all so new and unfamiliar that you could say anything and I'd be into it. This guy is talking about intelligent entities (digipets) and quantum computers (prisms) in a way that has me totally sold. I highly recommend that everyone read it, at least twice:

Exhalation

An Anthology by Ted Chiang, Vintage, 2019

The Lifecycle of Software Objects

I've been waiting for this to come out in print for years. One of the main ideas is that in order to make a robot more like a person, you need to let it be a person; you can't just pump it full of if-thens. This is part of the idea that we will not be able to create artificial olfaction without artificial bodies to experience it first.

"She wants to tell them that Blue Gamma was more right than it knew; experience isn't merely the best teacher, it's the only teacher. If she's learned anything raising Jax, it's that there are no shortcuts, if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can't assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics i less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible." (p163)

Anxiety is the Dizzyness of Freedom

Quantum computers are real and they open portals to parallel universes where we can communicate with our para-selves as they separate further and further from us with every decision we make, and then we get either jealous or schadenfreude at their lives in comparison.

"She switched to video mode, and the text on the screen was replaced by a grainy image of her own face looking back at her. Her parallel self nodded at her and said, "Mic test."" (p271)

The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling

On recording everything and then going back to check.

"We don't normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone who's thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound." (p226)