Today marks the beginning of our study of the novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects, whose author, Ted Chiang, was named to Time magazine’s list One Hundred Most Infuential People in AI (2023).
This morning, after your Scrabble debriefing, you and two or three of your classmates will compose a short piece of writing that addresses one of the conflicts or sources of potential conflict in the first two chapters of Chiang’s novella. The guidelines for your assignment follow.
Directions
Compose a statement of at least one complete sentence that begins with a signal phrase for a quotation that addresses one of the bulleted items below, follows the quote with a parenthetical citation, and concludes with words that convey the situation’s conflict or indicate its potential for conflict. Do not include the word conflict. Instead, describe the conflict or explain its possibility.
Example
Ana Alvarado, who studied primate communication and “dreamed of following Fossey and Goodall to Africa” (66), and the animator Derek Brooks, whose design work is limited to such tasks as fashioning “a body that manifests the digients’ gestures” (67), both find themselves pursuing careers that differ considerably from the ones they had envisioned for themselves. The discrepancies between their plans and their current circumstances prompt questions about their futures. Will their days at Blue Gamma be marked by satisfaction or resignation, and how will their attitudes affect their relationships with the digients?
- The differences between Ana Alvarado’s and Derek Brooks’s perceptions of the digients (69-70).
- Lolly, the lion cub digient, learning an obscenity from Stefan, the Blue Gamma trainer in the Australian office (73-74).
- Blue Gamma customer Andrew Nguyen’s interactions with his digient (76-77, 79).
- Jax, the digient with the neo-Victorian robot avatar, “inhabiting” the SaruMech robot body, and SaruMech’s plans to rent the robot bodies, rather than sell them.
- Blue Gamma’s design of an alien species, Xenotherians, commissioned by a group of artificial-life hobbyists.
In the second half of class, we will discuss what you’ve written about the conflicts and potential sources of conflict in chapters one and two. Afterward, I will introduce the annotated bibliography and preface assignment, your third and final major paper assignment for the course.
Scrabble Debriefing, Part II: Viruses You’d Like to Catch
Although viruses are infections to avoid, playing viruses in Scrabble by using all seven of your tiles will earn you fifty bonus points. That was the case in last Friday’s game pictured above. Using a blank for the e, a team played viruses vertically by adding the s to leap for a total of seventy-five points.
Next Up
Wednesday we will meet on the lower level of Smith Library in a glass-front room near the tables where we met on September 16. Lauren Ksa, Head of Research and Instructional Services will lead us through the process of using library databases to locate sources for your bibliography.
