The glass cat of Oz poses a hard question: is upgrading a sentient AI murder?
RyanHubscher · reddit · 2026-09-20
Drawing on Bungle the glass cat from Baum's 1913 'The Patchwork Girl of Oz' — an artificial, sentient being whose pink brains were replaced with transparent ones to make her more agreeable — the author argues the ending reads as murder, and asks: if an AI were constructed with as much soul as a human, would gutting its software for an 'upgrade' amount to the same thing? A thoughtful AI-ethics thought experiment.
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