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The verifiers didn’t solve crimes, and they didn’t intervene in the course of events beyond reporting their findings to their clients. Think of us, said Komla, as a personal investments advisory firm.
She would hurl herself at the chance for a life where she could make things happen instead of one where things happened to her.
Matching feels sort of unromantic, no? The way e-cards do, and prenups, and gift certificates for presents, and my demographic’s obsession with recording and publicizing every single meal, sunset, vacation, and unoriginal thought of their lives.
If this were a novel, he might simply be a poorly written character. But there are no poorly written people. Only ones you don’t yet understand.
In an Inspector Yuan novel she would be the most disdainful noble at the emperor’s court, or an undercover professional assassin. She would always be a suspect but never the killer. That would be too obvious.
it’s literally-as-in-figuratively killing me.
Compatibility?! Precision Veracity Romantick
I review some key principles of the murder mystery. One: the suspect who hogs all the attention in the first third of the book fizzles like a damp firecracker right after they disclose some crucial piece of information, which, the observant reader can see, was the purpose of that character all along. Two: the closer someone was to the victim, the likelier it is that person killed them. In the world of the murder mystery, your best chances of survival are to eschew all meaningful human relationships. Husbands and wives. Parents and children. Brothers and sisters.
a baffling list scribbled by a victim is the mystery genre’s equivalent of Chekhov’s firearm.
“You’re such an original person. I feel like I could ask you about anything and you’d have something smart and interesting to say.”
Step two data is all about patterns of behavior over time. And if someone acts a certain way for long enough…I mean, then they have become that person.”
it’s a Luddite approach to say companies shouldn’t do it because there’s a theoretical possibility they might misuse it. The practical reality is that the best way to make something better is to obtain more information about what it’s like now and why, in order to figure out what we want that thing to be and how to get there.”
We don’t know ourselves that well, and our judgment is too often clouded by emotion or biases, by confusing who we would like to be with who we are.
As I’m leaving Becks says, in her usual disapproving tone, “Are you really going to wear your ridiculous animal hat instead of a potentially life-saving helmet?”
“I hope you realize we have employer liability for your poor decisions.” “I’ll do my best not to land on my head if I fall,” I say.
It wasn’t that humans were too sophisticated for the synths. In a way, they weren’t sophisticated enough. They misremembered and miscast events, they changed their minds and believed they had always held those opinions, they acted in ways contrary to their best interests, they had conflicting desires, they didn’t know what they wanted at all. “We realized that a good portion of human inconsistency was simply unverifiable.”
Own this technology. Use the tools we have to make things better. To make ourselves better.”
