Tell us about yourself and The Pinocchio Chip.
I’m a psychiatrist, with an undergraduate degree in chemistry and physics and a lifelong interest in scientific discovery. Over the last decade, I’ve become immersed in climate change mitigation and more recently the existential risk of rapidly evolving AI. I imagine the near future through the lens of enduring human struggles, dilemmas, and suffering. My Brink of Life Trilogy was inspired by the younger generation’s fantasies of immortality. “What could possibly go wrong with that?” The question behind most great SF stories underpins the Trilogy. My sequels to A Stand-in for Dying each feature one of its minor characters.
How did you choose the genre of your book?
Science fiction is a logical choice for someone who is curious about how the world works and imagines how it might work as technology evolves. Imagining how people facing emotional problems like OCD or depression might deal with a changing world adds another dimension to the stories’ tension.
How did you develop your characters?
Photina was introduced in A Stand-in for Dying as an AI learning to read and emulate human emotions from her human mentor Corinne. Her learning fell short of experiencing emotions despite her increasing attachment to Corinne. Corinne’s eventual death creates a crisis that propels Photina to the brink of grief, grasping at a feeling she observes in the humans around her, but still just beyond her reach.
Photina’s development was a delicate balance between crafting a character with enough emotional depth to engage readers while respecting the limits of artificial intelligence, particularly in the realm of emotions. Photina’s character respects those limits while her counterpart gradually exceeds them. She maintains her detached perspective as narrator while experiencing her double’s emotions vicariously. Her investment in the outcome of the conflict is motivated by moral values that are based upon Asimov’s Laws of Robotics.
Did you envision your storyline from the beginning or did you change it as you wrote?
When I began writing The Pinocchio Chip several years ago, I considered several alternative plotlines. One story developed the hacking theme and centered on the search for the hacker. I considered romantic entanglements between Photina and either a human or another AI. When chatbots entered the culture and distinguishing AI from human responses became increasingly challenging, it occurred to me that the crucial quality distinguishing people from AIs is the capacity to experience emotions. Crossing that threshold became the focal point of the story, which took wings once I changed the narration to her voice. How might superintelligent AI respond to feelings differently from humans? And how might that go spectacularly wrong?
Portions of this Q&A were edited for clarity.
