BookClub: The Lifecycle of Software Objects, from Ted Chiang’s Exhalation collection of stories

LayTech's BookClub section discusses intriguing themes in science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. While we try to preserve plot twists and not reveal endings, it’s best to visit this section and ponder after you’ve read the book or chapter covered.

Are we able to differentiate why certain things make us feel a certain way and when those feelings are justified? We seek pleasure and avoid pain -- a fundamental programming language embedded into our behavior and existence thanks to evolution. Sex is very pleasurable and thus we go out of our way to search for, find, court, and engage with a mate that we find attractive. Attraction itself, while subjective in many aspects, has common threads. Biology has shown that attraction tends to favor certain markers of good health and compatible genetic variation. Pain warns us against harm that could impact our physical ability. Thus, the feeling of pleasure and avoidance of pain ultimately serve functional and utilitarian purposes – to keep us alive and to get us to reproduce.

But what if we felt those things in the complete absence of the correlative end goal? Imagine a sensory-rich virtual world. What if we experienced these pleasures virtually but completely devoid of a goal or objective? Would it do us good to pursue or act on those feelings if there was no tangible effect beyond making us feel, or not feel, a certain way?

These are some of the questions that The Lifecycle of Software Objects raises -- a short story from Ted Chiang’s collection of stories in his book Exhalation. More specifically, the story asks if emotional and sexual bonds between people and virtual beings is worthwhile or even appropriate. The story focuses on Ana, an animal lover whose job at the zoo has vanished and who has invested time to develop new, in-demand, software testing skills. We find her going through the grind of interviewing and finding a new job when her friend introduces her to a tech start-up that promises to elegantly meld her two worlds. Ana learns that the start-up is creating digital beings (“digients”) in animal avatars that are developed from a digital genome and who live in a virtual world. Lucky for Ana, the Company’s mandate enables her to draw from her passion for animals and her newfound skills to push ahead in the next step of her career. But very soon her job becomes all-consuming and ends up changing her life forever. When the startup fizzles and others move on without a blink, Ana feels a sense of loss since she’s become attached to the digital creature that she has trained and groomed.

Her digient continues to develop skills, hobbies, and a personality. And, when the digients’ virtual universe is at jeopardy, it becomes Ana’s life purpose to make things right. In her dedicated quest, Ana’s actions, life decisions, and worries, raise important questions about the subjects of our emotions and whether they ought to be rooted in the physical world and calibrated with our biological programming to survive, connect, and ultimately proliferate.

As a human being, Ana has inborn concern for the young and cares for their well-being. And like sex and avoidance of pain, there is a very existential purpose to these inclinations: to support rearing of youth and promote self-preservation. What then happens when a virtual world triggers and manipulates those tendencies but is very much not real, not there, and disconnected from the physical world? Is Ana’s and others’ time invested in a worthy purpose?

In one poignant scene, as the start-up folds, Ana realizes that she tried to escape the pain and emotional grief that she felt when the zoo closed, only to experience it again where she least expected it. At first, it seems very ironic that in what is supposed to be an objective, calculated, and very mathematical profession she experiences her most profound emotional pain and grief for a loss of what is ultimately software. But the story also illustrates the transformation that technology, software, and related professions have experienced in the last few decades. Software as a utility and its development as a human endeavor and profession has permeated our lives in a deep and uncharted way. It has transcended the one-dimensional stereotype that used to characterize it, often dismissed as devoid of the warmth, seeming chaos, and sometimes confusion that describe other people-centered endeavors. This is because we start to use applications that challenge our old perceptions and incorporate social experiences and elements, blurring the line between what is real and what is virtual.

Like many of Chiang’s stories, there is no singular prescription but there’s abundant food for thought and moral contemplation. The short story has enough substance and organic plot development to have potential as a novel and it is able to really draw the reader into the story and to fire up mirror neurons as we find ourselves thinking of, liking, and bonding with the digital munchkins and their caretakers. The closest analogue that we have currently in our everyday life is our connection to our beloved pets -- our dogs, our cats, and the like. How come we care for them so much, sometimes more than we do for some other people? Should we be investing our emotional energy and money to give our pets the best that life has to offer them by pampering them? Or are we better off focusing our effort on fellow people who could really use some of that love or support?