Caleb James DeLisle on Nostr: Part 2: Book Review: Theft of Fire In case you didn't read the above, SPOILERS. I'm ...
Part 2: Book Review: Theft of Fire
In case you didn't read the above, SPOILERS. I'm not going to spoil the entire book just for the fun of it, but there are some aspects of the story that are revealed "in due course" and you can't really describe the story without them.
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One of the key points to this story is about what makes a human. All three characters struggle with being considered "things". Marcus is treated as a means to an end by Miranda who just wants the artifact, Leela is treated as a question-answering bot by Miranda who created her, and Miranda's motivation to get the artifact in the beginning is to amount to something more than the idle princess that is what her family MADE her to be.
In the story, traditional AI never went anywhere and human simulation inside a computer works but is obscenely rare and expensive. Leela is one of about 10 AIs in the known universe, each one costing tens of thousands of bitcoin to build. Miranda is the inventor of this type of AI which is how she was able to take Leela from her company (a company her father took over and cheated her out of almost all the stock).
When Leela first wakes up (because Marcus found her in a shipping container and put power to the machine) she thinks she's still the girl stuck in a medical pod after a complication from surgery (brain scan).
Marcus shows her that she's not human which puts her into hysterics and for most of the book she refuses to talk to Miranda. Miranda is angry at Marcus because TELLING an AI that it's not human is extremely delicate and can easily cause them to go crazy or die.
Marcus having no experience with AIs only perceives Leela as a little girl, who he takes on as his "adopted daughter".
Miranda's struggle with her humanity is not revealed until near the end, but it goes deeper than anyone else's. Her father is one of the children of "HIM", the unnamed man who invented space exploration - an obvious reference to Elon Musk. Because her behavior is learned from her obscenely wealthy family, she tends to treat people like objects as second nature. She herself is treated like an object, a 3rd daughter who will be married off and become a trophy wife for some other wealthy oligarch some day. Because of this and her ridiculously over-engineered genetics, she's never had an actual friend. Everyone is either completely turned off by her behavior, or completely turned on by her body.
The way the three characters eventually find their humanity is by learning how to treat each other as humans.
In case you didn't read the above, SPOILERS. I'm not going to spoil the entire book just for the fun of it, but there are some aspects of the story that are revealed "in due course" and you can't really describe the story without them.
---
One of the key points to this story is about what makes a human. All three characters struggle with being considered "things". Marcus is treated as a means to an end by Miranda who just wants the artifact, Leela is treated as a question-answering bot by Miranda who created her, and Miranda's motivation to get the artifact in the beginning is to amount to something more than the idle princess that is what her family MADE her to be.
In the story, traditional AI never went anywhere and human simulation inside a computer works but is obscenely rare and expensive. Leela is one of about 10 AIs in the known universe, each one costing tens of thousands of bitcoin to build. Miranda is the inventor of this type of AI which is how she was able to take Leela from her company (a company her father took over and cheated her out of almost all the stock).
When Leela first wakes up (because Marcus found her in a shipping container and put power to the machine) she thinks she's still the girl stuck in a medical pod after a complication from surgery (brain scan).
Marcus shows her that she's not human which puts her into hysterics and for most of the book she refuses to talk to Miranda. Miranda is angry at Marcus because TELLING an AI that it's not human is extremely delicate and can easily cause them to go crazy or die.
Marcus having no experience with AIs only perceives Leela as a little girl, who he takes on as his "adopted daughter".
Miranda's struggle with her humanity is not revealed until near the end, but it goes deeper than anyone else's. Her father is one of the children of "HIM", the unnamed man who invented space exploration - an obvious reference to Elon Musk. Because her behavior is learned from her obscenely wealthy family, she tends to treat people like objects as second nature. She herself is treated like an object, a 3rd daughter who will be married off and become a trophy wife for some other wealthy oligarch some day. Because of this and her ridiculously over-engineered genetics, she's never had an actual friend. Everyone is either completely turned off by her behavior, or completely turned on by her body.
The way the three characters eventually find their humanity is by learning how to treat each other as humans.