A deft and enjoyable satire of the near future.
Domingos offers a speculative novel that looks at the future of American politics driven by artificial intelligence and culture wars.
A presidential debate in the year 2040 features two candidates: Republican PresiBot, an AI created by KumbAI, a startup tech company; and Democrat John Raging Bull, a Lakota chief. The Democrat expresses disdain for “the colonizers’ machine”; the Republican accuses Raging Bull of not being Native American. After a mechanical malfunction causes chaos, Ethan Burnswagger and Arvind Subramanian (KumbAI’s CEO and CTO, respectively) brainstorm strategy and recount how they came to be in this situation. Soon, they’re whisked away to Washington, D.C., to meet with Dave Newald, the successful CEO of Happinet, which uses technology to control people’s emotions; he offers them $350 million for their company. As Raging Bull discusses political strategy with his campaign manager, Naomi Jackson, Arvin pitches PresiBot’s AI system to Mike Granite, another potential investor. Along the way, the KumbAI duo navigates various threats to PresiBot while aiming to keeping him running properly. Externally, they face the public skepticism, media scrutiny, and the unpredictable actions of a political opponent; internally, they face the technological limitations and flaws of PresiBot itself, as well as tensions within their own team about how to manage them. The novel reaches its climax during a follow-up debate; afterward, as one character puts it, “the real roller coaster ride begins.” Domingos’ novel is a fast-paced adventure that satirizes politics and the tech world. He not only succeeds at illustrating the dangers of advanced AI, but also finds just the right element in each scene to keep readers engaged and laughing (while keeping the preachiness to a minimum). The book is full of great lines that highlight technology’s modern influence on humanity, as when Newald comments, “Emotions are just numbers. They can be measured and tweaked like anything else.” Nonetheless, the story is rife with tension, and it never lets readers forget how dangerously close fiction can be to reality.
A deft and enjoyable satire of the near future.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9798350963342
Page Count: 226
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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