I was recently reminded of the old Scottish grace, “Some hae meat that canna eat, And some wad eat that want it; But we hae meat, and we can eat, And sae the Lord be thankit.” Expressing thanks for one’s blessings is a wonderful practice – but what if there’s no one to be thanked?
Ken Liu’s 2012 short story “The Perfect Match” is a disturbing premonition of a world where Facebook is everyone’s personal assistant. What struck me most forcefully, though, was that although a Turing-test-capable personal AI is a key character, and feeding the algorithm drives the plot, the story is told in entirely human terms. There’s no sense, let alone a depiction, of the super-human technology that I imagine is driving everything. (Spoilers.)
