Machinehood

This book is full on ideas and questions about artificial intelligence and how it can integrate with humans. It presents a future dominated by the gig economy, humans have to take advanced enhancement pills to compete with bots and weak AI's (WAI) in the labour force, people have online "tip jars" to receive money from other users that are watching their live social media feeds. It is a disturbing view of the future where there are swarms of nano cameras everywhere, watching and broadcasting everything you do to the internet. The main plot point is the conflict raised by a movement to defend WAI's and bots rights and end the inequality between humans and artificial intelligence. It also touches on the human+machine integration, and how that could change the world. It has lots of interesting ideas, it shows personal insights of the day to day lives of the characters, new views on religion, glimpses of life in space stations, some simplified politics conflicts. I thought that the final resolution of the plot was too easy, and a little bit too rushed.

2.5 stars.

It's 2095, and technology has of course advanced rapidly, with the population reliant on designer pills and AI assistants as they primarily toil away at gig work. Posthumanism is in full effect, with some embracing transhumanism. In such a tech dependent society, a threat emerges that forces the populace to confront and fear its dependence on machines. Our hero springs into action to stop this "Machinehood" but first must determine if it is a smart AI, a group of neo-Buddhists, or a technophobic caliphate.

If you can push politics, some forced character construction and plot points, and some all-too-convenient and none-too-believable story twists aside and read this book for its entertainment value alone, then it might be worth picking up. But clearly the author meant for this to be a novel that inspires reflection on our relationship with technology. Unfortunately, the book falls short there.

This is in part because the author refuses to go all-in in her socio-political analysis. So we have horrific neoliberal capitalism that is sometimes bad, but not too bad. Venture capitalists as mournable victims but also cheats. A nauseatingly patriotic protagonist who has issues with the government. A strident defense of private property and law and order even when those things don't work out. There's so much waffling, I need some syrup. To top it all off, there's that elephant in the book called Orientalism (with a dab of Islamophobia), in that throughout, we constantly hear that "dark" North Africa and its ever-expanding caliphate might be humanity's existential threat. That's a tiresome trope.

I wish I could have liked this book more, but not with all those flaws. And one pet peeve: the caliphate is called al-Muwahhidun. The book always refers to it as "the al-Muwahhidun." But "al" in Arabic means "the." So literally hundreds of times we read about "the the Muwahhidun." The lack of knowledge to catch that error in many ways encapsulates the quality of this book on the whole.