Comment by isoprophlex

It might be just me but I found this story incredibly boring and difficult to get through, so much so that I haven't gone back to finish the rest of Exhalation yet. The ideas are very interesting, like all his stories, but the plot and characters feel like bare-bones scaffolding, just there so we can call it a story instead of an essay. I think it could have worked as a short story, but as an almost full-length novel I really needed something more to feel engaged. The ending is also kind of strange, he introduces a brand-new philosophical conundrum and then just ends the story instead of exploring it.

Unfortunately Ted Chiang has now started doing a lot of AI commentary, under the belief that because he wrote a story about something called AI, he knows how real-life things work, simply because they're also called AI.

Noone can ever escape metaphor-based development in the AI field.

It's such a good story that one. Feels incredibly relevant and timely today.