Machinehood

This book is full on ideas and questions about artificial intelligence and how it can integrate with humans. It presents a future dominated by the gig economy, humans have to take advanced enhancement pills to compete with bots and weak AI's (WAI) in the labour force, people have online “tip jars” to receive money from other users that are watching their live social media feeds. It is a disturbing view of the future where there are swarms of nano cameras everywhere, watching and broadcasting everything you do to the internet. The main plot point is the conflict raised by a movement to defend WAI's and bots rights and end the inequality between humans and artificial intelligence. It also touches on the human+machine integration, and how that could change the world. It has lots of interesting ideas, it shows personal insights of the day to day lives of the characters, new views on religion, glimpses of life in space stations, some simplified politics conflicts. I thought that the final resolution of the plot was too easy, and a little bit too rushed.

I think this book landed for me in the cool concept but not enough connection bracket. Divya is obviously a super intelligent person, and she's done a terrifyingly good job of imagining the future of AI, nanotech, tip jars, gigging, and streaming, but I think there's so much time spent on what the world is, I forgot to connect to the characters. Which is a shame because I love a hero mom and a space cult. I liked it overall, but rarely made extra time to read it.

Pros: brilliant worldbuilding, interesting characters, thought-provoking, international setting

Cons:

Olga (Welga) Ramirez only has a few months of shield work left before she ages out of it, which is why she's ready to ignore the tremors her zips (enhancement drugs) seem to be causing. To placate her boyfriend, she asks her sister-in-law, Nithya, a biogeneticist, to look into it.

Protecting drug manufacturing funders from protesters as a shield is a semi-dangerous but rewarding and steady job in a world where most people can only find gig work. When a new protest group, the Machinehood, ignores the established ‘rules' and kills the funder, leaving a manifesto behind, Ramirez realizes the world is about to change.

I really liked the two main point of view characters. Welga's a bad ass former soldier who loves to cook. Her side of the story deals with the physical aspects of modifications. Nithya is the primary wage earner in her family which makes things a challenge when she discovers she's pregnant and has to stop using the drugs that allow her to work. Her story is about juggling family and work. Her story also deals more with ethical problems. The book also has a minor non-binary character which was cool to see. And while the story shows that racism isn't dead, this character faces no in text negativity, so maybe humanity in this future has progressed in that respect.

The worldbuilding was incredible. The amount of history the author created is mind boggling, especially given its detail with regards to politics, conflict, ethics, and most importantly science (with the development of mech technology, then bots, then zips and veemods). I also appreciated the differences in attitude shown by people of various ages with regards to the technology (as it changed) and privacy issues. Also the mixing of technologies - static and moldable items - was really cool, and showed that people adapt new technologies at different speeds depending on their wealth and rural vs urban positioning.

There's a large emphasis on the gig economy and how having machines take over most physical work makes employment difficult for humans. Global warming also shows up in the form of climactic shifts in regions of the world (like Arizona being subject to repeated dust storms).

I loved that the book had an international setting with one major point of view character in India, major mentions of North Africa and Singapore, nods to China and Europe in addition to a fair amount of action taking place in the United States.

This book would be fantastic for book club meetings as there are a lot of interesting discussion possibilities, specifically around ethics, but also with regards to technological advancements and how things like privacy and the gig economy will change in the future.

I noticed in a few places the author gave the same information twice, in one case using almost the same language both times. This isn't really a problem beyond the fact that the repetition was unnecessary and therefore a little distracting.

The ending felt a little simplistic given the complexity of the problems the characters are dealing with, but it did wrap things up well.

This is a fantastic book, alternating fast paced action scenes with slower paced visions of life. There's a lot to think about in this complex possible future.

I'm not entirely sure what the point of this was. Yes, it told a story that went from point A to point B, but nothing much seemed to have changed in the end: the horrible dystopia was still a horrible dystopia but, hey, at least you now have the prospect of getting Siri implanted in your brain.. In addition, the story seemed to rely on some pretty spectacular coincidences (the main character has been invited to join the very space station that is at the center of the Machinehood, and she happens to have the perfect illness to uncover corporate shenanigans, and her sister-in-law just so happens to have the exact skillset to uncover said shenanigans), and there basic plot seemed to be high implausible "hey, we have a new technology; as a sales device we will revert the planet technology level by 100 years, causing widespread death and destruction, but we'll get away with it because, whoopsie, maybe we overstepped the mark".

At the end of the 21st century humanity is co-existing with bots that do all the work. Humans work ‘gigs' where they watch over machines, Amazon Mechanical Turk style. Or they down various pills - some with nanobots, some only chemistry - to enhance their mental or physical abilities. The economy is controlled by the pill-makers - the ‘funders' - who race to develope newer and better enhancements, while most of humanity scrambles to earn a living. Then a seeming human-bot hybrid terrorist group appears on the scene demanding personhood for machines.

A lot of smart-to-scary concepts in play here. Smart materials, reconfigurable apartments, supportive A.I. agents, a tipjar economy of constant surveillance and performance... Sometimes there were even too many ideas happening at once, and sometimes the protagonist's insistence on being the only savior was a bit too much, but all in all this was a great scifi read.