It was a while ago that I read it, but there’s this passage:
He had been to the factory once, with Barth; it had been a confusing and, in a way, a frightening experience. Barring a handful of executives and engineers, there wasn’t a soul in the factory—that is, Burckhardt corrected himself, remembering what Barth had told him, not a living soul—just the machines.
According to Barth, each machine was controlled by a sort of computer which reproduced, in its electronic snarl, the actual memory and mind of a human being. It was an unpleasant thought. Barth, laughing, had assured him that there was no Frankenstein business of robbing graveyards and implanting brains in machines. It was only a matter, he said, of transferring a man’s habit patterns from brain cells to vacuum-tube cells. It didn’t hurt the man and it didn’t make the machine into a monster.
But they made Burckhardt uncomfortable all the same.
I took the implication to be that Burkhardt buried his discomfort by dismissing the minds in the computers as nonsentient (or just refusing to think about their sentience), so that “real” humans were free to use them as they chose; thus making it karmic when it’s revealed that the advertisers running the (admittedly physical) town regarded him the same way. It’s not a pure example, though.
Yeah, that discomfort’s a lot of the point of the story. I suppose it raises the issue in that way implicitly, though Hydrogen Sonata sets out the problem explicitly in detail.
FWIW, the problem of simulations that constitute people got a mention in Iain M. Banks’ The Hydrogen Sonata.
Also in John C. Wright’s Golden Age trilogy, and the 1954 story The Tunnel Under the World by Frederik Pohl.
I don’t recall the actual problem being mentioned in Tunnel Under The World. Of course, I don’t have a text copy to hand … quote?
It was a while ago that I read it, but there’s this passage:
I took the implication to be that Burkhardt buried his discomfort by dismissing the minds in the computers as nonsentient (or just refusing to think about their sentience), so that “real” humans were free to use them as they chose; thus making it karmic when it’s revealed that the advertisers running the (admittedly physical) town regarded him the same way. It’s not a pure example, though.
Yeah, that discomfort’s a lot of the point of the story. I suppose it raises the issue in that way implicitly, though Hydrogen Sonata sets out the problem explicitly in detail.