Source pages: Quotes batch 7
Quote pages: Gibson — Agency
“Say somebody wrote a self-replicating platform, then loaded Eunice, whatever we mean by that, as core entity. The platform spawns subagents as it encounters situations that might benefit from attention… Then they report back, show their work, and get subsumed into her Borg.”
And the central question about AI consciousness:
“You feel like you have emotions, to me.” “Where’s the line between modeling them and having them, though? But I know I can’t just make them go away.”
Eunice presents the most careful formulation of the hard problem of machine consciousness in the novel: not “do AIs have feelings” but “is there a distinction between modeling feelings and having them?” See free-will-and-moral-responsibility for the parallel: if behavior is determined by structure, does the substrate (neurons vs. code) change the ethics?
Gibson’s wit and precision
“The plus sign is a hipster ampersand.”
Gibson deploys aphorisms with a copywriter’s precision. The novel contains more such lines — the “tactical” hood, “legibly nerdy” — that do character work in five words. The style is compressed without being cryptic: each line rewards rereading.