Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” — one of the longest works in his Exhalation collection — covers over more than a decade, tracing the lives of artificial intelligences, or digital organisms (“digients”), from their creation to their uncertain future.
Ana Alvarado, a former zookeeper turned digital trainer, is hired by Blue Gamma, a startup that develops digients: AI, animal-like virtual pets that inhabit a shared cyberspace. These beings begin with infant-level cognition and grow through play, human interaction, patience, and guidance. Ana becomes deeply attached to her assigned digient, Jax, while her colleague Derek forms a similar bond with his digients, Marco.
At first, the digients enjoy popularity, but when Blue Gamma’s hosting platform, Data Earth, declines and the company folds, owners like Ana and Derek are left to care for their digital pets without corporate support.
Over the years, they struggle to keep the digients grow through platform migrations, software updates, and shifting legal frameworks. The digients develop distinct personalities and relationships, yet remain wholly dependent on their human caretakers’ time, money, and commitment.
As technology advances, Ana and Derek are offered ways to “rehost” the digients into more marketable forms — including sexual companions or monetizable intellectual property. They refuse, choosing to protect the digients’ autonomy and individuality over convenience or profit.
Through this, Chiang invites us to confront profound questions without providing answers.
Humans are flesh-and-blood, bound by physical needs, aging, and mortality; digients are lines of code, free from hunger, fatigue, or inevitable aging. Human growth is organic and irreversible; digient development can be paused, backed up, or altered. Humans are born through biology; digients are coded, designed and engineered.
And yet, digients seem to form bonds, develop apparent self-awareness, and express what look like desires. Are these genuine feelings or mere simulations? Does the distinction matter if the behavior is indistinguishable? If we raise digital beings as we would children, and they think and act like persons, what — if anything — makes them less deserving of rights? Do they have feelings or do they pretend having feelings? Are human love and responsibility defined by biology?
In the end, The Lifecycle of Software Objects is less about AI than about us — about what we owe to the beings, biological or digital, that we create through coding or through biology, and later we nurture, and about the fact that some commitments, once made, are worth keeping even if it's made to a digital pet and even when there’s nothing to gain except the bond itself.