As one particularly illuminating passage discusses when a digient’s owner announces that his wife is pregnant: On one hand, humans uniquely value themselves as a species, and even the most dedicated digient owner eventually moves on. That career history gives us a nice framing: it allows us via Ana to compare humans to animals, and therefore to contextualize the personhood debate around the digients throughout the story. One core objective of this story is to really interrogate the meaning of a “person.” Chiang sets up our main character Ana as a mother of a digital entity (a “digient”) who was a zookeeper in a past life. I have pages of notes from this story, but we can’t cover it all, so I want to zoom in on just two threads that I found particularly deep and rewarding. That wider canvas offers us an enormous buffet of topics to discuss, from empathy, the meaning of humanity, and the values we vouch for to artificial entities, the economics of the digital future, and onwards to the futures of romance, sex, children, and death. This is a much more sprawling story than the earlier short stories in Exhalation, with much more of a linear plot than the fractal koans we experienced before. Thinking about The Lifecycle of Software Objects Feel free to add your comments in our TechCrunch comments section below this post.That page also has a built-in RSS feed for posts exclusively in the Book Review category, which is very low volume. Follow these informal book club articles here.Want to join the conversation? Feel free to email me your thoughts at or join some of the discussions on Reddit or Twitter (hashtag: #TCBookClub).Some questions for the fifth story in the collection, Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny, are included below. Can a time machine offer us the meaning of life?.What is our meaning in life in a world of technology?.Can we debate free will versus destiny in four pages?.If you’ve missed the earlier parts in this book club series, be sure to check out: Centered in a future world where virtual worlds and generalized AI have become commonplace, it’s a fantastic example of speculative fiction that forces us to confront all kinds of fundamental questions. The goal of this book club is to expand our minds to new worlds, ideas, and vistas, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects doesn’t disappoint. For the next installment of the informal TechCrunch book club, we are reading the fourth story in Ted Chiang’s Exhalation.

The lifecycle of software objects