Science Fiction as a Haven for Convergences and Divergences among Philosophical and Speculative Hypotheses in Ethics: The Study of Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor,, Department of English Language and Literature, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

This article compares literary and philosophical approaches to AI ethics by reading "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" alongside Nick Bostrom's AI philosophy, asking how Chiang's digients converge with and diverge from philosophical formulations regarding predictability, moral status, technological determinism, and AGI. Through comparative textual and philosophical analysis, it places the novella in dialogue with Bostrom's writings on transparency, accountability, friendliness, and utilitarian governance. The study argues that Chiang's novella both reflects and critiques the deterministic and capitalist logic underlying contemporary AI ethics. Bostrom emphasizes predictability, transparency, incorruptibility, and economic utility as safeguards for managing AI—safeguards that, by their limiting nature, prevent AI from realizing its generality. Chiang, by contrast, foregrounds the affective, embodied, and socially embedded dimensions of digital beings. The novella exposes the violence of technological obsolescence by depicting the digients' reduction into marketable and telemobile commodities, while presenting their experiential growth, heuristic intelligence, and emotional singularity as evidence of genuine generality. The findings suggest that Chiang develops a "non-human humanism" reconfiguring autonomy, equality, and social belonging beyond anthropocentric limits. Against Bostrom's utilitarian, control-oriented framework, Chiang presents unpredictability, embodiment, and mutual adaptation as necessary conditions for acknowledging AI moral status and realizing AGI. The article concludes that literary fiction expands the ethical imagination of AI beyond the restrictive logic of capitalist optimization and technological determinism found in Bostrom's framework.

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References

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Journal of Philosophical Investigations
Volume 20, Issue 56 - Serial Number 56
Articles
Issue 56, Autumn 2026
October 2026
Pages 395-422

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