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A Calculated Life (2013)

by Anne Charnock(Favorite Author)

3.55 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1477849513 (ISBN13: 9781477849514)

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

47North

review 1: This was really interesting. If it had been a bit longer (it is under 200 pages) and had a real ending I would give it 5 stars.I loved the portrayal of the manufactured people who are essentially autistic savants. They aren't so good with human interaction , but they can and do try to calculate everything. And I mean everything, including their human interactions. This is one of the most original portrayals of artificial humanity I have read.
review 2: We are perhaps a little more than a quarter of a century away from the first machine that will become conscious. There is no reason to believe that the consciousness of a machine will be anything like ours. Anticipating the inner life of such a creature provides a wonderful source of material for science fict... moreion. Anne Charnock's Jayna, in A Calculated Life, is a richly and satisfyingly imagined "simulant". So skilfully is Jayna written, that we don’t realize at first that she isn’t one of us. She is no Commander Data, from the Star Trek TV series, nor the Maria robot from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. What can she do that we can’t do? Compute and seek correlations in data to a much higher level than any human brain. What can’t she do that we can do? Unlike Commander Data, she has emotions, unlike the previous Freda and Freddy models, but the social experience that would allow her to make sense of these is deliberately restricted by the “Constructor”. So we get a being who is somewhere on the autistic spectrum, struggling for her right to be fully human. The plot itself is thin, but this is more than made up for by the opportunity to peep out at the world from the eyes of another conscious being. less

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