I’m kind of convinced that this book was meta-non-fiction. It follows the history of artificial intelligence and the various ways that machines interact with humans, ostensibly with an eye to the future of the relationship humanity will have with robots once they tiptoe closer to sentience.
That sounds like a good book.
This is not that book.
This book, I’m pretty sure, may have been the first full length book put to press written by an automaton.
It would explain a lot – why the narrative jumps all over the place, why we follow one team constructing self-driving cars and their progress then jump to Steve Jobs and the team designing Siri and then back again to research laboratories in the 1970s, why there are random anecdotes that have nothing to do with robotics or the topic at hand. If there was any organization to this book, I couldn’t find it; there was no thematic unity to the chapters, nothing organizing it chronologically, nothing cohering differing methodologies…. it was all over the place, and by the end of it I was turning pages to turn them.
So, if this is the result of AI writing a book, we either have nothing to fear from them, or they have successfully found a way to get us to waste our time poring over text so boring that they’re an immediate danger to us all. I prefer that idea to the author having been paid money to write this.