A review by maiakobabe
Artificial: A Love Story by Amy Kurzweil

reflective sad slow-paced

2.5

This long, thoughtful, meditative comic unfolds the story of a family driven by creativity and invention, traits which have both saved and consumed their lives. The author's grandfather, Fredic, was a Jewish musician and conductor living in Vienna before WWII; his talent provided the connection he needed to flee to the US on the eve of war. He married and had two children before dying young. His son, Ray, became an inventor whose early experiments in machine learning and machine generated art and music, as well as various robotics, proceeded much of the invention we see today. In middle-age, Ray became obsessed with the idea of typing up all of his father's letters and journals and turning them into an AI chat-bot which he and his daughter could communicate with. Whether you find this meaningful or monstrous will depend a lot on your own personal relationship with AI. Honestly, I struggled to understand why someone would feel they could know a deceased loved one better by chatting with them through an algorithm (owned by an outside tech company, mediated by human and machine decisions) than by simply... reading the journals and letters. Ray's desire to create a digital simulacrum of his father, dead for fifty years, felt motivated by unprocessed childhood grief and folly. My understanding is that the majority of this book was written before our current Chat-GTP dominated era, so there is no discussion of how the majority of AI programs available today are built on stolen creative work and are already straining our energy grids and water resources. (Google recently proposed building seven new nuclear reactors, simply to power its AI). Please know that the comic does delve into more than this one topic; there are thoughts on the meaning of life, of health, death, immortality (through art or AI); on inherited family neurosis and memory. I think many people will find much to enjoy in this book. I simply found myself in such strong philosophical disagreement with so many of the ideas expressed by Ray that it was hard for me to focus on some of the other threads of the narrative. I would still recommend checking out the book if the themes seem interesting to you!