Founder connections
- Demis HassabisRecommended on The Ezra Klein ShowThe original show’s published episode notes name this work in Hassabis’s three book recommendations on 11 July 2023. His edition is not identified.Source
Summary
Greg Egan imagines people whose minds can be copied into software. Paul Durham keeps creating digital versions of himself for experiments, but the copies develop their own wishes and can choose to stop. Maria Deluca works with an artificial world governed by simple computational rules.
The novel uses these lives to explore identity, time, choice and the conditions under which a simulated person might count as a person. Its imagined technologies are part of the fiction. This record uses the 2014 Night Shade paperback, not an identified personal edition.
Why read it Our view
Ask who can consent, stop an experiment or control a digital copy when software begins to resemble a person. The story can sharpen ethical questions about simulated agents without providing evidence that its imagined systems are technically possible.