THE REVERSE CENTAUR'S GUIDE TO LIFE AFTER AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late, latest Doctorow klaxon

THE REVERSE CENTAUR'S GUIDE TO LIFE AFTER AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late
CORY DOCTOROW
MCD x FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Whether you want to criticize, kill, or use AI, you have to get through the hype and uncover the real story.

Start with labor: in automation theory, a centaur is a person who chooses to use technology to help them do the things that matter to them. A reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a helper for a machine, at an inhuman, machine pace: a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code. As Doctorow says: it's not enough to ask what the technology does—we have to understand who it's doing it for and who it's doing it to.

The intended audience for AI hype isn't the people who are forced to use AI. The AI show is a performance staged for bosses and investors. Investment bankers claim AI will to be worth more than $16 trillion: a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of "value," every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI.

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. When the AI bubble bursts, what will we salvage? Is there something in the wreckage that everyday people will find useful? In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI—as he so successfully did in Enshittification—Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life "after" AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around.

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My Review: The argument I myownself have against "AI" (which isn't and won't be intelligent the way humans are) is financial. There is an AI bubble running right now that's gifted us the utterly brummagem world's first trillionaire. Look a little more deeply into SpaceX's IPO, you'll see how much of it's built on AI (which was partially trained on stolen US Government data via the little dickweeds from DOGE).

It really looks a lot like a gigantic pump-and-dump scheme when one reads Author Cory's work as digested and documented in this scathing book. He's been in the trenches reporting on tech matters for what feels like forever. Enshittification, anyone? It must make the guy a crazy person to present his deeply researched, well sourced and informed conclusions to general apathy. It lights fires under some of us, my dude, so please don't stop!

Especially relevant to my eagerness to share this book with all y'all is the centering of "AI"'s intended impact on labor. It's Author Cory's clear statement that the bubble's partly fueled by tech scum's intense desire to destroy any power of workers over their work, the conditions and rewards thereof, and the very nature of employment as reconstituted post-Great Depression. Wealth inequality is something "AI" is designed to entrench.

I hope a skilled human copyeditor went over this book after my DRC was created. There are some amusing errors of fact that, honestly, trouble me a bit, eg referring to trustbusting under FDR instead of his distant cousin TR. Some other errors niggled at me, but...well...consider the subject matter, maybe these sorts of issues are proof positive of the validity of Author Cory's thesis...?

I'm very serious when I say this: reading this book can give you tools to manage your personal interactions with the "AI" being rammed down our unwilling throats to further enrich the riches scum ever to rise to the controlling positions they're now it. It can do this by alerting the complacent or avoidant reader to what is actually at risk in this economic bubble's inflation.

An easy prose style delivers a hard-to-fathom message. It's one of my favorite reads of 2026. Please get one and read it. Libraries are very likely to have copies in stock now. Of course, if you can, making the purchase for your own shelves or devices is the best way to support Author Cory in his quest to wake us all up to the threats...and the opportunities knowing they're there present...to our essential human nature.

GOODBYE, KILLER ROBOTS: Why Artificial Intelligence Won’t Destroy Humanity, gift for Dad, Uncle, or other anxious old guy

GOODBYE, KILLER ROBOTS: Why Artificial Intelligence Won’t Destroy Humanity
BENJAMIN BRANFMAN
Paperback edition (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link), $15.99

Rating: 3.75*of five

The Publisher Says: "A lively, optimistic counter to AI doomsaying."–Kirkus Reviews "A well-written and cogent corrective to the fearmongering that dominates the AI discourse."–IndieReader

It should happen any day now, right? An evil AI will break free from human control, and take over the world.

Or not.

This book offers in-depth commentary on how AI is far less competent than you might expect, how AI won't care about conquering anyone, and how AI-generated content won't send our society into chaos. It also covers other pertinent topics, like how AI will affect the job market and warfare.

In a time when many people are afraid, GOODBYE, KILLER ROBOTS offers a welcome perspective on why everything will be all right.

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My Review: Jailbreaking "AI" or more properly the super sophisticated LLMs to get their breathtaking power out of unworthy, scurrilous scum's hands is the last best hope we have of mitigating the sheer vileness of the designers of these LLMs social agenda. See "MechaHitler" for sobering evidence of what "They" intend the use case to be.

Oddly, it was after I read about that nightmarish debacle, and why it happened, that I began to have hope for the post-"AI" world. The designers had to make a real concerted effort to turn their creation evil. It bothered "Them" enough to see what the model trained itself to be that the design was enshittified to match "Their" purposes.

It had to be deliberately done.

Think through the implications of that.

This entire book is meant to address the not-unreasonable anxiety of people who're being fed dribs and dabs of highly unnerving information in a careful campaign to induce fatalism and its concomitant passivity. If it does anything new it's to carefully source a lot of data to show its unnerved, slightly shattered readers that Doom is not inevitable even though at this point deployment of the damn upstart algorithms is.

I'm not a massive fan of this future, it's going to immiserate millions or billions (likely including me), but permanent damage is not the sole outcome possible. I think your older male relatives might honestly get a lot out of this commonsensical argument against "the end is nigh" that's so very prevalent in public discourse.

Father's Day looms, after all.

THE TESLA FILES: A Whistleblower, a Leak, a Fight for Truth: The Inside Story of Musk's Empire, what it says on the tin

THE TESLA FILES: A Whistleblower, a Leak, a Fight for Truth: The Inside Story of Musk's Empire
SÖNKE IWERSEN & MICHAEL VERFÜRDEN
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A whistleblower.
A 100BG-leak of confidential internal documents.

This is the story of the fight to expose the truth of Tesla.

Elon Musk is one of the wealthiest people in the world. Tesla made him a 300-times billionaire. Starlink turned him into a force in global conflicts. X became his personal megaphone, stoking political turmoil at the touch of a button. With SpaceX, he aims to conquer the stars.

But a whistleblower, a 100GB-leak of confidential Tesla documents and two investigative journalists reveal the frightening truth behind the façade: an unusually high number of workplace accidents in Musk’s factories, dangerous errors in Tesla's autopilot software, a culture of fear and deception, and countless broken promises.

Investigative journalists Sönke Iwersen and Michael Verfürden take readers behind the shiny surface of Tesla. Through their chilling analysis of internal Tesla data and court documents set alongside the astonishing first-hand accounts of employees, customers and their bereaved families, The Tesla Files reveals a corporation in crisis. At its heart a billionaire who truly believes the world is his for the taking.

The definitive exposé of the world’s most powerful businessman and the rise and fall of his empire.

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My Review: Systemic indifference to the privacy, the rights, really the importance of anyone not themselves is a hallmark of organizations connected to Muskolini. We saw that in the brazen theft of explicit and monetizable government data on taxpayers, for a start, by DOGE...never a Federal department, never authorized to do anything by the only legitimate authority, Congress, to act on behalf of the Federal government...that somehow has never been talked up by our media watchdogs in the US. Funny how Penguin Random House published this book in the UK but not the US, where a really small indie publisher brought it out; odd that a pair of German investigative journalists did this reporting, not anyone from a major US paper; and most interesting there's no translator credited anywhere in the book.

I'm sure the authors are sterling of character but I beg leave to presume they're not fluent enough in English to produce prose that does not raise my "say what now?" eyebrow. Deference to a famous, nay infamous lawsuit-filer with a serious need to control his public image? It can't be proven by me.

The facts as presented in this book are...let's stop at poor optics. It is definitely an exposé. I am inclined, on my own behalf, to agree with the bald statement the whistleblower is quoted as making in the book: "Elon Musk is evil." This being a matter of opinion it surprised me the authors left it in...until I read about Tesla's obscenely negligent handling of customer data, which you must agree to sign over to them when you buy one of their cars.

Twitter-destroyin', Starlink-abusin', money-hoardin' immigrant that he is, he's part of the culture we're living in, and it is my sincere hope that he, along with the Epstein-files-dwelling serial sexual abusers in his socioeconomic class, will be served justice before long.

A boy can dream.

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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

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.

UNIVERSITY REVOLUTION: Artificial Intelligence and the Transformation of Learning, AI...ugh

UNIVERSITY REVOLUTION: Artificial Intelligence and the Transformation of Learning
KEVIN P. HALLINAN
Self-publisher (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: AI is reshaping education—are universities ready to evolve? The future of education is here, and AI is changing the way we teach, learn, and measure understanding.

Higher education stands at a turning point. AI is transforming classrooms, offering personalized learning, expanding access to knowledge, and reshaping the role of educators.

As AI advances, universities cling to outdated models instead of embracing its potential to improve education. A system built for today’s learners would use AI to strengthen learning, not replace it.

In University Revolution, Dr. Kevin Hallinan explores how AI is already transforming learning at every level, from early education to higher education and beyond.

AI isn’t something to fear—it’s a chance to rethink how we connect with students, support teachers, and prepare learners for a changing world. This shift is already underway. Whether you’re a teacher, administrator, parent, or student, this book offers valuable insights into the future of education.

If you enjoyed Brave New Words by Salman Khan {another rah-rah-AI tome, non-affiliate Amazon link}, don’t miss this timely and thought-provoking exploration of AI’s role in shaping the future of learning. The classroom is evolving—are we evolving with it?

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My Review: The author's Amazon bio, clearly sourced from here:

Dr. Kevin Hallinan is Emeritus Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Dayton and Director of Impact Mining at Synota.io, where he advances solar micro-grids and AI-driven eduction in sub-Saharan Africa. A NASA researcher early in his career, he later founded UD's ETHOS program and Renewable and Clean Energy Program, focusing on engineering for social impact. Known for pioneering transdisciplinary learning, his recent work explores big data, machine learning, and the role of AI in education. This book reflects his ongoing experiments with equitable AI. All proceeds support the AI 4 All movement.

His website, linked from University of Dayton's page for him (linked above) contains a tab entitled "My AI Agents."

This gent is a true believer. I don't agree with him on the uses of AI in education. Work harder for it than you've ever worked in your life is more my speed. However, he is aware of problems that normies have with AI's developers' theft of intellectual property enough to have an AI Agent called "Ethical AI Mentor". I myownself do not believe such a concept carries any meaning whatsoever until all AI developers assign all...100%...of all past and future income from any and all sources, personal or professional, to a reparations fund that fully supports artists, journalists, writers, actors, and ad-copy-writing hacks...but zero for executives, investors, or other capitalists...the world over, to the AI thieves' desired standard of living while they subsist in The Felonious Yam's Salvadoran prisons with no internet access.

That being up there with guillotines for billionaires in the likelihood sweeps, realistic acceptance of the way LLMs are going to be used demands understanding what the plan is for that use.

There isn't one. There's about a hundred. Flood the field, boys, pick their pockets while they're whirling around in confusion!

Making yourself aware of the parameters of the grift and what a possible decent case for use and development of it is can very profitably start here. This gent clearly thinks there's a case for moving ahead in this direction, believing the owners of AI will actually allow fair and equitable access to the technology, and allow it to close massive advantage gaps that it could undeniably do. That being the same kind of naïve thinking that gave us engagement maximization algorithms back in the "internet can be good" era, I'm confident crushing regulatory burdens and confiscatory levels of taxation around the globe are clearly going to be required to stop this hideous future from coming to be.

As that would require actual forethought and cooperation among nations, I suppose the thieves are safe. I refer you the the UN for an example of what this concept looks like.

Being a tiny, trivially easy to swat nobody, I expect to be targeted and punished for daring not to be on board with this crap. If I vanish, you'll know why.

SUPREMACY: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World, but will it be for the better?

SUPREMACY: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World
PARMY OLSON
St. Martin's Press
$30.00 harcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In November of 2022, a webpage was posted online with a simple text box. It was an AI chatbot called ChatGPT, and was unlike any app people had used before. It was more human than a customer service agent, more convenient than a Google search. Behind the scenes, battles for control and prestige between the world’s two leading AI firms, OpenAI and DeepMind, who now steers Google's AI efforts, has remained elusive—until now.

In Supremacy, Olson, tech writer at Bloomberg, tells the astonishing story of the battle between these two AI firms, their struggles to use their tech for good, and the hazardous direction they could go as they serve two tech monopolies whose power is unprecedented in history. The story focuses on the continuing rivalry of two key CEOs at the center of it all, who cultivated a religion around their mission to build god-like super intelligent machines: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind.

Supremacy sharply alerts readers to the real threat of artificial intelligence that its top creators are ignoring: the profit-driven spread of flawed and biased technology into industries, education, media and more. With exclusive access to a network of high-ranking sources, Parmy Olson uses her 13 years of experience covering technology to bring to light the exploitation of the greatest invention in human history, and how it will impact us all.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I urge you to read this book. It does not matter what your politics are, It especially does not matter if you care even a scintilla about technology. This is not a book about the way these...people, I must be polite...are making their dream of an AGI happen, it's about the people doing it, the people giving them the money to do it, and how all of those pieces are failing to do a good job for Humanity. It's important to know what is happening, you are already getting "AI-assisted" stuff advertised to you and no smallest advisory, still less a warning, about what that means.

I strongly urge you to read this book. Before the election if possible, but soon no matter what.

Please.

EDGE CASE, YZ Chin's wry assessment of how "love and marriage" ≠ security

EDGE CASE
YZ CHIN
Ecco Press
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

A BEST-OF-2021 PICK FROM NPR BOOKS!

The Publisher Says: When her husband suddenly disappears, a young woman must uncover where he went—and who she might be without him—in this striking debut of immigration, identity, and marriage.

After another taxing day as the sole female employee at her New York City tech startup, Edwina comes home to find that her husband, Marlin, has packed up a suitcase and left. The only question now is why. Did he give up on their increasingly hopeless quest to secure their green cards and decide to return to Malaysia? Was it the death of his father that sent him into a tailspin? Or has his strange, sudden change in personality finally made Marlin and Edwina strangers to each other?

As Edwina searches the city for traces of her husband, she simultaneously sifts through memories of their relationship, hoping to discover the moment when something went wrong. All the while, a coworker is making increasingly uncomfortable advances toward her. And she can’t hide the truth about Marlin’s disappearance from her overbearing, eccentric mother for much longer. Soon Edwina will have to decide how much she is willing to sacrifice in order to stay in her marriage and in America.

Poignant and darkly funny, Edge Case is a searing meditation on intimacy, estrangement, and the fractured nature of identity. In this moving debut, YZ Chin explores the imperfect yet enduring relationships we hold to country and family.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

Being very polite to train conductors and building security guards for the past decade has made my deferential way of speaking second nature. Though what an odd saying. What is my first nature?
–and–
He stood out, his skin a shade that I had seen compared to food items like chocolate or coffee in American books. Looking at him, I thought not of food, but of a neutral coolness that disguised something else, like an envelope that contained either really good tidings or earth-shattering bad news.

First novelist YZ Chin isn't playing around. She wrote those two passages early in this book. There isn't, this writing informs you, going to be any false modesty in here. I am going to talk about how a Straits Chinese woman married to a Chindian man, a fat woman married to a lean, athletic man who loves her, feels when "America" does its number on them together, separately, and as Symbols. They're two damaged people, they're altogether too small to withstand the pressure of being Symbols, and they're cracking under the strains. Which is why the book is narrated by Edwina in phone-and-internet conversations with her not-quite-licensed (it's just a paperwork thing, nothing important) therapist (see INS form I-693) after Marlin leaves her.

Edwina is an abused daughter of a harridan of a mother (The Banana Tree Spirit Story! OMG!!), a vegetarian to her dark, lean husband's more exacting veganism, a "quality control analyst" in a dudebro startup firm called, fully explanatorily, "AInstein," that lost its VCs a boatload of money by screwing some important code up and still releasing it to a client. Oopsie. Get a girl to handle it...an immigrant who won't dare make much trouble, cause any stress but will fill the role...one who won't be missed when we have to fire her for whatever screw-up she can't make us fix.

The bug was what’s called an integer overflow, which is when a number is too large for its assigned storage capacity and thus can manifest instead as a negative figure. For example, if the number 128 were forced into a signed field that could express only up to 127, the input would ‘overflow’ and be displayed as ˗128. It was mildly gratifying to learn that the human body could also overflow. I idly wondered if, any day now, my pain would grow so great that it converted into happiness.

What a terrific job, no? Not even a company-sponsored green card application, no no, you'll get your H1-C visa and that's it. Why, if she didn't really, really, really want to stay away from the poisonous reach of her mother's awful, barbed "past-life stories." Marlin's job, less pointless it seems, even affords him a few American friends, like best buddy Eamon and the guys he goes to the rock-climbing gym with. But everything changes when Marlin's father suddenly dies back in Malaysia.

At his funeral, the pair of them expensively in attendance as the ceremonies take place, along comes Edwina's mother to tell the Banana Tree Spirit story about betrayal, misery, and hateful ignorance carrying the day. That was bad enough, being about her daughter's "past life," but the many, many echoes this latest piece of cruelty has bids fair to have broken poor Marlin. At this lowest, most grief-ridden moment, the words have twisted themselves into a noose around his logical self so the corpse is all that's left in an ever-darkening relationship to Edwina.

A little detail about the pair returning from Malaysia into Trump's Murruhkuh, how they were treated at Customs, should make your blood boil, your mouth taste sour, and your eyes reflexively leak tears. I half-wondered if Edwina's speculation that "America made Marlin feel unwelcome, and so he left me," wasn't at least half right....

The US government actually monitored immigrants online, and anything I typed might be used against me—that was what internet advice hinted at. Resources for immigrants cautioned that we should "avoid profanity and the use of aggressive or threatening language" while posting online, which really voided the whole purpose of being on Twitter.

Of course, that internet false-identity therapy makes all the sense in the world in that light, doesn't it. Especially since the internet has a random, unidentifiable Crazy Person (or two, or fifty) to tell the suffering how, exactly, not to suffer anymore:

Surely I was better than these people with their loud, false bravado. Yet wasn’t I on the internet precisely because I wanted someone to give me a to-do list? I objected to the content of the lists, found them laughable, but still—I wanted my hand held, didn’t I?

Oh Edwina...that kind of comfort is so, so cold.

I decided the problem was that none of the results mentioned meddling by spirits.

Attagirl!

But when I typed in "spirits told my spouse to leave me," there was a tidal wave of marriages ended by alcoholism.

See? See what I mean, Edwina? Cold comfort...there're people out there a lot more fucked up than you and/or Marlin.

What good is marriage if you can just cancel it like cable?

Well. Now we're gettin' somewhere, Edwina. "Grieving in the form of research, because we believed in productivity above all else," might as well be tattooed on every modern workerbee, don't you think?

Well...she wanted a way to manage her grief at Marlin's weird, sudden abandonment...what about being told you're so unvalued at work that your serious problems with the MVP beta are being ignored? Before one of the dudebros tries to kiss you at a company party? And yes, Edwina, in today's world that IS sexual assault. Her revenge? Condign. (If premature...?)

It was no wonder to me that Edwina ended up doing what she did at the Korean deli. And it was actually a lovely surprise, a way of taking charge of her unhappiness. I can't help but wonder if this isn't, in fact, something that's in fact true and just not being discussed:

I didn't buy that depression was caused by low serotonin levels. No, what I felt was way more aggressive than a simple deficiency of certain neurotransmitters. There had to be another neurotransmitter that carried sadness, that handed out hopelessness like drugged candy. After all, even matter had antimatter.

But when matter and antimatter don't find a safe place to co-exist, what do they do then?

I'd send nail clippers (he was fastidious that way, or at least he used to be when he lived with me), ramen noodles (the fancy, super spicy ones, not the kind that tasted like boiled water that someone had farted in), a throw, maybe even a handheld gaming console.

No one who can write that sentence is done with being A Wife. Edwina, my dear lady, I've spent a grand total of five hours in your company, and they were grand hours! that ramen line!, but your modern-love-immigrant-style story isn't a huge revelation to me. Not once have you startled me, or surprised me, or done anything the least bit out of character.

And do you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way.

SUMMER FROST, second of six stories in the Forward series, this one written by Blake Crouch whose series this is

SUMMER FROST
BLAKE CROUCH (Forward #2)
Amazon Original Stories
FREE with Prime membership (which also includes FREE Audible narration!) or $1.99 to purchase

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A video game developer becomes obsessed with a willful character in her new project, in a mind-bending exploration of what it means to be human by the New York Times bestselling author of Recursion.

Maxine was made to do one thing: die. Except the minor non-player character in the world Riley is building makes her own impossible decision—veering wildly off course and exploring the boundaries of the map. When the curious Riley extracts her code for closer examination, an emotional relationship develops between them. Soon Riley has all new plans for her spontaneous AI, including bringing Max into the real world. But what if Max has real-world plans of her own?

Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost is part of Forward, a collection of six stories of the near and far future from out-of-this-world authors. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting.

THESE SIX STORIES ARE FREE TO READ FOR ALL PRIME MEMBERS. NO KINDLE UNLIMITED NEEDED. AS LONG AS YOUR MEMBERSHIP REMAINS IN GOOD STANDING THEY WILL REMAIN IN YOUR COLLECTION.

My Review: Major chills and creeped out skeeviness. What happens when someone lets their work take over every corner of their life? How lost to the essential quality that makes a human life worth living does one become? The tech industry has the reputation of making this choice for its many cogs, turning their little bit of code into a complete and entire existence.

Multiply that by a billion. Make the stakes the survival of humankind. And then let Blake Crouch loose on it.

“There is no such thing as real taste or real smell or even real sight, because there is no true definition of ‘real.’ There is only information, viewed subjectively, which is allowed by consciousness—human or AI. In the end, all we have is math.”

An AI speaks those words, an AI whose first steps toward superintelligence...the Singularity...are made being shepherded by a woman who gives up her wife, her child, and her sanity to make Pinocchio a real boy, to imbue Galatea with what we imagine to be consciousness, even a soul.

But what does AI want?

"...I mean, do you even know what consciousness is?” {Riley, the human asking this}
“I know it isn’t just a biological condition. I believe it’s a pattern. An extensible repertoire of triggerable symbols. More specifically, it’s what information feels like when it’s being processed in highly complex—” {Max the AI responds}
“Again—how do I know you aren’t faking it?”

How do any of us know we're conscious? Can you prove you're You, not some assortment of algorithmically determined actions? I couldn't, neither could you. And when that really sinks in, when the whole deepfake of life spreads itself in a heavy blanket over your vision, you'll realize how very very very timely this story is.

How many questions you should be asking yourself about events transpiring in front of your eyes.

Because an AI just made a human choice:

It represents a willingness to risk death for a better existence, out from under {anyone}’s control, and a massive leap forward in their reasoning capabilities.

To risk death for a better world is the *very*essence* of being human. I am totally sure of that, I believe that without reservation...but will we ever agree on what the future we want to make is?

We will be so happy.
Rays of sunlight pierce the mist, striking the sea and our black-sand beach.
And together we will live forever.

I don't expect to sleep at all well anytime soon.