#36. Has Futuristic Technology – In Our Likeness by Bryan Vandyke (Kindle)

It is strange to think that the science fiction of yesteryear seemed so unattainable. It really was the work of imaginative writers which made us think one day people would drive electric cars. It sometimes seems that if a writer can imagine it, then a person of science can try to make it happen.

There is a unique bond forged between art and science that so many people overlook. Those who scorn arts students for wasting tax payers money on "purposeless courses" (including governments) should consider how inextricably linked these seemingly opposite facets are.

The idea of Artificial Intelligence was once unthinkable, but now it surrounds us. Your smart phone can make a quick doodle look like a piece of art. If you're stuck writing a presentation it will write something for you. In some respects, it is current technology, however, it is not without its flaws. There are little giveaways that show when work wasn't written or drawn by a human hand. AI is still futuristic technology, so when this book surfaced in my choices for August's 2024 Amazon Prime read, I thought I would take a chance on it.

 

“Graham Gooding is a leader at a tech start-up when his brilliant coworker—and work crush—Nessie Locke asks for help testing a new algorithm. Graham jumps at the chance to impress her, and to improve his floundering personal life. He soon discovers that the algo is more powerful than Nessie—or anyone—realizes. It was built to detect lies on the internet, but when Graham makes a small edit to Nessie’s online profile, hoping to see if the program will catch the lie, Nessie changes in real life. The algo can alter the real world. Now, so can Graham.

 

No one knows what Graham has done, except his boss, enigmatic tech guru David Warwick. Graham is racked with guilt, but Warwick thrills to the possibilities of what they can do next. This promises to be the innovation that will make Warwick a household name. Drawn by the power of the algo but terrified by its potential for chaos, Graham must decide what to do and whom to trust in a world where one true reality no longer exists.

 

As love, trust, memories, and what it means to be human begin to slip away, Graham and Nessie work together to restore the past—before it’s lost to the anarchy of a world without truth.”

 

Ordinarily, if I visit a bookshop, I don't tend to head off to the Sci-fi section; I don't know why because I've read some great books in that genre. This does not fall into the "great" category, but it is a short well-paced novel that I superficially enjoyed and I think others less familiar with Sci-fi would probably enjoy it too. Those who love their Sci-Fi? Well, I'm not too sure. The book had an interesting premise, but I suspect it could have been handled a bit better. When I finished the novel I thought I'd enjoyed it, and to an extent I did. I found it easy to read and I finished it over a weekend, but when I picked up my notes to write the review, I realised that there was a lot in the novel that rankled me.

Graham has developed an infatuation for his colleague Nessie, but he lacks any self-confidence and can't tell her his true feelings about her. Now this is fine, we all have moments of self-doubt and we may worry what people think about us, but I found Graham's rambling inner monologues about the matter moved him from shy and retiring to incel territory almost immediately. I didn't know what was creepier, Graham or the AI algorithm he started messing about with. Actually, I do know what was creepier; Graham tweaking Nessie's on-line profile to remove her tattoos and finding out they had suddenly disappeared in real life shocked me, but once he realised that his actions could change things physically in the real world, he continued to tinker with the program to see what else he could do to people. This was very disturbing and said a lot more about his character than the technology he was trialling.

Because I don't read reems of Sci-Fi, “In Our Likeness” feels like an original novel; it was scary to think that someone has imagined that you can tweak certain parameters on a person’s media profile so they will change accordingly in real life. It might seem idyllic to re-route traffic in order that it no longer runs outside your house, but really, that is a horrifying thought. Imagine the carnage if everyone was able to do the same thing wherever they wanted!

Even though this is the land of make believe, it is appalling to think about someone making things how they want via a click on their keyboard. When Nessie looked at her arm, she was unaware she had once had a tattoo; in her new reality she never got one in the first place, all of her memories of what was just disappeared overnight.  

"The place was so low tech that we felt safely out of the algo’s reach. Nessie paid in cash for the room. She wrote a pair of egregiously fake names in the ledger—Patty and Joe Chip."

Hmm, sure I've heard that name before. I Googled and yes, it felt like a nod towards the protagonist Joe Chip from Philip K Dick’s science fiction masterpiece “Ubik.” In that novel, Joe is a technician who also experiences strange changes in reality. I suddenly stopped thinking that this felt like an original novel. After a while I got fed up of the algorithm being called ‘the algo.” Maybe this wasn’t a book written for a fuddy duddy like me! 

If I didn't particularly like the protagonist Graham, his boss David was even worse. I certainly wouldn't describe him as "enigmatic" and I wondered whether all techy people had to have a godlike complex to succeed in the industry, as apart from Nessie, I couldn't really relate to the characters, or indeed how they spoke to one another.

Another matter I failed to understand was the algorithm itself. Bear with me. I know this is Sci-fi, it's not real...however, the novel states that in order for the world to be changed, anything in the digital world which was related to it must be changed too. That's a lot of work when everything relates to something else. That means that Graham must have really looked into everything in Nessie's life for him to be able to change her, which is basically cyberstalking. However, when Graham moved onto changing bigger things in the world, he could still do it, anything he wished for he could change, suddenly nothing seemed to be impossible with a few clicks of the keyboard.

"I scroll through tweets and posts and photos from people I know or once knew, people I haven’t seen in person in years—decades, sometimes—and it’s hard to tell who’s putting up a front, who’s talking tough, who’s hurting, who’s hurt, who’s virtue signalling, who’s spoiling for a fight. Is that what all this technology gets us? Just one more place to parade all our self-deceptions, all our make-believe lives?"

One thing the book does achieve is to allow reflection on the modern age of social media. I have a love/hate relationship with social media. I think it has its place in society, but it is so over used and abused that I have to question whether it was a worthwhile invention or not.

I see informative posts from pet rescues and the mounted police, so it is a fantastic platform for raising awareness or engagement. But then I see reems of posts of people vacuously pouting at the camera, or pictures of someone’s tea from the night before. I don’t even “follow” these people so I don’t care what they look like, or what they had for tea (unless they’ve been somewhere really nice and it's an experience I might wish to try myself.) I get that some people might be lonely and are trying to engage with the wider world, but there must be a better way than posting a picture of a greasy plate of egg and chips. And people are angry, so angry; their posts full of vitriol saying things they would not dare to say face to face. 

I think social media has its place, but it is taken for granted and when people fail to appreciate something its drawbacks are quickly overlooked. The power of this book is to allow the reader to think about how Graham allowed the corruption of the algorithm to influence the real world, and for readers to think about how social media platforms are allowed to corrupt people’s perceptions of what is happening in the real world. Governments and media the world over are able to influence important decisions by playing with social media algorithms. Populations of all nations allow ourselves to blinded by that corruption, and like lemmings, people blindly follow what is being posted online, never once thinking who is twisting our reality, or why.

 

Genre: Science-Fiction, Dystopia, Technology, Contemporary, Literary Fiction

Release Date: 1^st September 2024

Publisher: Little A

Pages: 224

 

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