User Profile

From Wikipedia: "In the novels, magic is real and works similarly to corporate law."

Leslie Klinger is an expert in Sherlockian literature and an attorney who fought to keep Sherlock Holmes in the public domain despite attempts by the Conan Doyle estate to argue otherwise. The Conan Doyle estate attempted to argue, during litigation relating to Netflix's Enola Holmes and Miramax's Mr Holmes, that copyright law protects certain personality traits of Holmes that were only alluded to in later stories (whose copyright has not expired). But Klinger was successful in persuading the court that copyright law does not protect personality traits of fictional characters.

I read this some time back, but began thinking about it again recently. It was tricky tracking it down based on the vague impression I had at the back of my mind, but the re-read was entirely worth it. The incredibly imaginative premise of the story is that the essence of humanity, perhaps what some people would describe as a 'soul', is the ability to observe, to collapse the quantum wave function and resolve superposition into existence. General AI with free will lack this innately human ability, and hence are frozen in a state of superposition when not observed. Putting aside the scientific inaccuracy, the story is chilling, haunting, and dystopic, yet at the same time a gripping, imaginative thriller.