The Lifecycle of Software Objects

With all the AI news these days, I've been thinking about how everyone seems to expect a human-level intelligence to sprout, fully formed, from some startup's churning data centers. Of course, no thought ever goes into the personhood of such a being - it's always about how it will be useful as a kind of product-slave.

It was refreshing to read this novella, which explores an alternative future. What if we end up with basic intelligences that we have to raise as if they were children? As a parent of a toddler, this felt pretty realistic. Of course, once you've built a relationship like this, you start to think of this “software object” as a real person...