A review by lilith_bookshelf
Soul and AI: Discovering the Essence of the Spirit in the World of Artificial Intelligence by Sykae

reflective medium-paced

3.0

I started reading this thinking it was sci-fi, and turns out it's a spiritual book. The way the author extended a simple idea in 150 pages surprised me. This book basically says that you need to do what fulfills your soul and makes you happy, not letting any AI or machine come in the way because an AI will never be able to help you find your happiness since they don't have emotions or a soul. That's it. There isn't any scientific study on why AIs don't have souls or anything like that, it's just a 150-page essay telling you to be happy without letting machines or any AI control your life. I understand the point, but were 150 pages really necessary? Many paragraphs repeated the same idea 2 or 3 times for it to be re-stated in the next paragraph. Extremely redundant for me. There were a lot of sentence fragments (not a complete thought in the group of words), and the way the author played with the personal pronouns the book was directed to confused me. It will start with "you need to..." and then switch to "because we..." in the same paragraph, and they never used "they": the whole book is filled with "he/she, him/her, himself/herself" which took me out of my immersion and made it even more confusing. Why not just use "they"? If it was to be "inclusive" with the pronouns, "they" is still inclusive and grammatically correct when the subject is of an unknown genre, and it's the pronoun non-binary people prefer. Besides this, the book was not bad, but it wasn't really good either. I feel the title of the book doesn't really fit since it barely mentions the AI and was more about the spirit, but I mean, it's not horrible. Again, not good but I don't despise it.