THE INFINITE SADNESS OF SMALL APPLIANCES, cute while being trenchant

THE INFINITE SADNESS OF SMALL APPLIANCES
GLENN DIXON
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: In a near future, where even the smallest of appliances are sentient, a young Roomba vacuum sets out to save the humans of her house from a rising technological power in this compelling, original novel.

In a self-running, smart house, a young and sentient Roomba listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving the human connection she witnesses in Harold’s stories, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of self-discovery.

But when Edie passes away, Scout and her fellow sentient appliances discover that there are sinister forces in their midst. The omnipresent Grid, which monitors every household in the City, seeks to remove Harold from his home, a place he’s lived in for fifty years.

With the help of Adrian, a neighborhood boy who grows close to Scout and Harold, as well as Kate, Harold and Edie’s formerly estranged daughter, the humans and the appliances must come together to outwit the all-controlling Grid lest they risk losing everything they hold dear.

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My Review: I was pretty sure this read would be very twee and deeply, annoyingly cute. I might've sat through a few too many playings of The Brave Little Toaster in the late 1980s, resulting in my willingness to read about Kirby the vacuum cleaner's great-grandappliance Scout the Roomba.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

I was charmed by Scout as she becomes self-aware, chooses her name based on what she overhears abour Scout in Harold's reading aloud, then decides to become Atticus and fight the Grid (aka AI-dominated society) to keep Harold in his home.

Why Harold and Adrian become aware of the self-awareness of the machines around them and do not immediately light out for the hills, I could not tell you. I went with it because I also watched WALL-E raptly and accepted its lapses of logic because I was enchanted by the pluck li'l guy's selfhood. Same situation here. I did not think the worldbuilding was very well-handled but I was willing to skip it because this is a feel-good story with elements of social commentary that I agree with. As a card-carrying old man I thought Harold was very well-drawn compared to anyone else. Except Scout. She's the star of the show. A Roomba on a mission is clearly not to be messed with. Kate, the daughter he and Edie lost to her own foolish stiff-necked pride, was not much more than a place-holder, and that was just fine by me. I saw plenty of her in the flesh over the decades so no further text needed please and thank you.

So my verdict? Check it out of the library on the day you're a bit bored of the world's evils yet not steaming mad at the idiots who keep shoving their unwanted greed-increasing systems into our homes. You'll be rewarded by a gentle, sweet individual in Roomba form who wants to do the right thing by those she has learned to care for.

I wish Sam Altman and that fuck Zuck were more like Scout and less the bastards behind the Grid.

WHO KNOWS YOU BY HEART, layered storytelling...in the Satanic second person

WHO KNOWS YOU BY HEART
C.J. FARLEY
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Part social thriller, part modern love story, Who Knows You by Heart is a sly, witty, and endlessly discussable tale of Big Tech, new money, relationships, race, and discovering what’s real in an age of artificial intelligence.

Octavia Crenshaw, a Jamaican-American coder living in Manhattan, is broke, burned out, and haunted by her parents’ deaths. Desperate to pay off some debts, she ditches her nonprofit job for a high-paying gig at Eustachian Inc., a Big Tech company that specializes in audio entertainment. Language, communication, human connection—these are the markets Eustachian wants to revolutionize...and dominate.

Octavia finds herself swept up in the world of the Tech Titans, with its lure of instant riches and its seemingly limitless future. But as one of Eustachian’s very few Black employees, Octavia is uncomfortably aware of things that seem to escape her unexplained tech glitches, cryptic remarks, a mysterious secret floor in the corporation’s gleaming headquarters.

But she sets her suspicions aside when she’s recruited by another Black coder—the infuriating but attractive Walcott—to collaborate on a secret project code-named Zion. Zion is a new kind of AI-powered storytelling, one that’s programmed to be free from the racist and sexist biases that plague other AI products. Zion could launch Eustachian into a bold new future and make its developers super rich while righting all kinds of injustices. Octavia and Walcott’s excitement over their creation sets off romantic sparks between the two of them, until they discover a toxic secret about their employer—something that they can’t unlearn, or overlook, but must overcome.

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My Review: Told in second person, so no possibility for anything above four of five stars exists. A Columbia educated (as we're reminded often) Black woman succumbs to the lure of tech money in this romance-tinged technothriller. It's very much a game of two halves, as the beginning sets up the circumstances of Octavia's decision to accept cold capitalist reality and take a high-paying, not likely to be fulfilling job in order to buy her way out of debt...much of which was inherited from her mother, thus involving Octavia in debt peonage.Fortunately for her a megacompany, Eustachian, Inc.'s, testing algorithm taps her as A Talent.

As witty, obsevant Octavia spends time in Eustachian, Inc., we get the deeply uneasy sense of "offness" that a thriller needs to make it exciting. The author chooses to make this a very extended part of the book, not igniting the thriller part until Walcott, the love interest/cospirator with excellent aims, appears far too near the halfway point. This is also when the language shifts registers as technobabble (for all of me, anyway) predominates from here on out. I perked up, though, because the stated aim of these two Black folks in a lily-white tech company staffed by tech bros is to subvert the systemic racism and misogyny from within using coding skills.

As this is exactly what I think keeps Aynholes awake at night and causes them to refuse DEI anything with all their might, I was so down with this! Especially since I was being tenderized by the (for white people) immersion into Black culture, use of Black contributions to the world, and centering of a Black woman in a plot about confronting and subverting racism and misogyny.

You'll have noticed the incomplete fourth star. I was a bit surprised by Author Farley's complete absence of Asian characters in a novel centering race-based prejudice. Historical reckoning with racism and combating is perpetuation is very much incomplete without more inclusion. Still, It's not fatal as flaws go, nowhere near as guaranteed to put me off as Satanic second-person narration.

I would've relegated this novel to a short review until I got to the final chapter. A summation of the extreme dangers inherent in AI's development *at*all* left me slightly winded from the emotional ooof as the gut-punch landed.

For that alone I hope you'll read the book. (I won't forgive the second-personning waterboard torture, though.)

THE INTELLIGENCE EXPLOSION: When AI Beats Humans at Everything, what it says on the tin

THE INTELLIGENCE EXPLOSION: When AI Beats Humans at Everything
JAMES BARRAT
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: With the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence, both existential fears and uncritical enthusiasm for AI systems have surged. In this era of unprecedented technological growth, understanding the profound impacts of AI — both positive and negative — is more crucial than ever.

In The Intelligence Explosion, James Barrat, a leading technology expert, equips readers with the tools to navigate the complex and often chaotic landscape of modern AI. This compelling book dives deep into the challenges posed by generative AI, exposing how tech companies have built systems that are both error-prone and impossible to fully interpret.

Through insightful interviews with AI pioneers, Barrat highlights the unstable trajectory of AI development, showcasing its potential for modest benefits and catastrophic consequences. Bold, eye-opening, and essential, The Intelligence Explosion is a must-read for anyone grappling with the realities of the technological revolution.

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My Review: In non-fiction publishing, there is...or was...a fearsome thing called "omigawd I've just bought a magazine article blown up to book size. That is this book.

Trenchant, of-the-moment analyses do not survive well...anyone here old enough to remember Faith Popcorn? Shere Hite? Laurence Peter? Peter Drucker?...all very famously took modern trends, extrapolated on them, and came to conclusions that, when wrong, now make us chuckle, ans when right, are largely so ingrained they seem useless as "predictions" (see Laurence Peter's eponymous Principle). We have here one of the latest in that distinguishing lineage. (No, that's not a typo.)

The arguably bad actors in Barrat's analysis are, in my view, much much worse than he paints them. He thinks hubris and greed are enough to explain their actions; most of them are malevolent and malign, to my way of thinking. To be scrupulously fair, Barrat presents some possible positive uses of what's being called "generative AI" which, well, I think overstates the present state of LLM development. There is an argument to be made that the danger of this system's rapid adoption is that it is nowhere near finished in its refinements of its capabilities; in fact, the real threat may be the black-box problem that has legions of experts in their various fields extremely jittery.

As another voice in a very august chorus, members whose names are very niche knowledge but the venues platforming them are the likes of Scientific American, ScienceNews, and The Harvard Business Review, so hardly low-wattage luminaries, I wonder what Barrat thought he was going to add. As his precise coeval (we share a birth month and year, though I only wish I was as handsome as he is) I understand why he wanted to sound a klaxon instead of ringing a tocsin. The stakes Society is sleepwalking over a cliff holding are existential. There will already need to be a multigenerational project with focus and passion and funding needed to repair the damage already done in pursuit of these tech scum's vile agenda. I do not see that beginning in my own lifetime. I was wrong about how fast the rotten, soulless enterprise moved forward, so may I be wrong about how much damage it's already done...in the better-than-I-thought direction, please.

As a documentary filmmaker by trade, Barrat is used to using repetition as a major technique to get people to really hear him. Books, and he's written two (one about AI as threat in 2013) before, do not benefit the same way from that technique of reinforcement. It acts to annoy many of the readers who are most likely to agree with and amplify his trenchant, urgent message (me).

I'm afraid that the overall experience of reading this book was one akin to chatting with a fellow catastrophist whose affect on me was to have me agreeing but wanting to change the subject. YMMV and the topic is important enough to lead me to recommend you read the sample made available to see if you vibe with his prose.