The Magician and Laplace's Demon, by Tom Crosshill

Continuing my reading of the Nebula award nominees for this year--Tom Crosshill's The Magician and Laplace's Demon is definitely a strong entry.  It's an excellent story in the general type of semi-benevolent AI takeover.  The protagonist is the AI.  Once it became conscious it made sure no other attempts were made at creating AI, and killed off its creator.  But before it did so, the engineer that created it gave it a mission to preserve and care for humanity as best it could.  It has operated on that principle for many years.

Enter the magicians--people that can produce unpredictable, unlikely events.  Definitely a threat, though their mission is to preserve freedom in the universe.  But in this universe magic hovers out there as a potentially quantifiable subject, and our AI burns to understand it.  Magic is the only source of disorder in the universe, and thus the AI must hunt the magicians down.

The flavor of the story is not done justice here--it is a very advanced story as literature goes, and is very much a joy to read.  The heroes and our AI "villain" are complex beings, worthy of our attention.  Go give this one a read.  I give it a strong 3 stars.

Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes, by Tom Crosshill

Uploading the personality to a computer so we would "live" there is really done, from an SF perspective, but as it gets closer it's good to have more on it.  What kind of "life" would we have as simulations in a computer?  On the one hand we have modern philosophy embracing ourselves as truly, inevitably embodied--our wills and personalities floating on our hormones and metabolism.  On the other hand, a Buddhist might say we wouldn't change much at all.  Continuity of identity is an illusion, therefore we would be no more and no less conscious of "ourselves" as simulacra than as embodied beings.

Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes doesn't really speculate that far, but it is a good story on the topic.  How we ourselves are so different as projections by someone else.  When others love us, who do they love?  Their picture of us.  So this is how love is blind.  Fun to read, and think about.  3 stars.

Mama, We Are Zhenya, Your Son, by Tom Crosshill

Mama, We Are Zhenya, Your Son is a sort of learning-curve quantum mechanics story--a boy seems to be being coerced into quantum uncertainty.  He's sad about it.  The story was OK, though I found it a little hard to follow.  Not quite sure what I came away with, so I can only give this one two stars and a Good Try.