Swiss director Simon Jaquemet sat down for an interview about his latest sci-fi film, Electric Child, and shared that another project he’s working on is an adaptation of Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects.
In an interview with Variety, Jaquemet called Chiang’s novella, a 110-page story first published in 2010 that is also found in his 2019 collection, Exhalation, “very clever and complex.” He didn’t share, however, any more details about his take on the adaptation, including whether it would be a feature or series.
The Lifecyle of Software Objects centers on the creation of child-like AI bots called digients, who humans buy and treat as a family pet or, in some cases, like a toddler. When digients’ popularity fades and the company that supports them goes out of business, the few humans who still care about them have to decide how to treat their digients in a world where others might want to use them for sex acts, among other things.
Jaquemet appears to be fascinated with AI—Electric Child, as you may guess, has AI enter the picture when a baby gets very sick—and said that, in addition to movies like Her and Ex Machina, he was inspired by the works of Stanislaw Lem.
“Apart from Solaris, I read Golem XIV [which introduced a ‘lecture’ given by a supercomputer] and Fables for Robots,” Jaquemet told Variety. “They are important to me, because they are exploring whether machines have feelings.”
No news yet on if/when Jaquemet’s adaptation of Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects will make its way to production, much less a screen near you.
