Notice that, as far as I can tell, she chose the instrument over Ted, and may have been helped in that decision by the encounter the Machines led her to. It may have been a false option to give both her breakup with Ted and the Stradivarius more meaning.
Yeah, though the minute you take seriously the notion that the Machines are simply lying to people about the degree of real risk involved, a lot of the emotional appeal of this story is subverted. (Why anyone in this universe believes otherwise, I have no idea; possibly it’s thanks to relatively subtle mind control.)
Even in the story, once she gives Nero the Strad, he has to decide to destroy it. She doesn’t appear to have a very complete model of Nero besides “we’re rivals.”
It’s also not clear to me that presenting someone with an option you strongly suspect they’re not going to take in order to frame their choice counts as lying to them.
Notice that, as far as I can tell, she chose the instrument over Ted, and may have been helped in that decision by the encounter the Machines led her to. It may have been a false option to give both her breakup with Ted and the Stradivarius more meaning.
Yeah, though the minute you take seriously the notion that the Machines are simply lying to people about the degree of real risk involved, a lot of the emotional appeal of this story is subverted. (Why anyone in this universe believes otherwise, I have no idea; possibly it’s thanks to relatively subtle mind control.)
Even in the story, once she gives Nero the Strad, he has to decide to destroy it. She doesn’t appear to have a very complete model of Nero besides “we’re rivals.”
It’s also not clear to me that presenting someone with an option you strongly suspect they’re not going to take in order to frame their choice counts as lying to them.