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Review
Confession and prayer were precursors to therapy; everyone is overworked and undervalued; technocrats want to build God in a computer. These are common themes of 2020s life, but there's still plenty to examine. The Shyler Project considers the case that a truly advanced AI would end up just like the rest of us: confessing to anyone who'll listen, overworked and undervalued, God in a computer. The synopsis describes a happy ending, but to me it feels ambiguous: (Spoiler - click to show)Shyler is going to be reprogrammed - presumably an analogy to medication, though it also reads as surgery - but we don't get to find out whether this succeeds, and the framing offers interesting implications about the continuity of self after modification. Maybe an intervention is better than leaving fate to an expert listener, or maybe with so much confession we're not asking what kind of society would create an AI to maintain people's mental health. Despite its linearity, The Shyler Project does feel more like a space than a story, responding to its protagonist's need and letting the reader consider these questions while waiting in line and listening to the dialogue. Of course, the dream of automation is to avoid queues altogether - and, of course, to avoid questions.
