
The Love Makers
Distributed for Goldsmiths Press
Overview
Author(s)
Praise
Summary
How artificial intelligence and robotics are transforming the future of love and desire: a philosophical thriller and essays.
A chance encounter between two women and a road trip into the future: It's Christmas Eve, and Scarlett, banker-turned-technologist, is leaving a secret underground lab to catch the last flight that will get her home in time to open presents with her three-year-old son. She offers a lift to a young woman in distress, who shares her intimate life story as they drive to the airport. These revelations will have devastating consequences for both of them.
The Love Makers is a philosophical thriller about female friendship, class, motherhood, women, and work—and how artificial intelligence and robotics are transforming the future of love and desire.
Aifric Campbell combines her novel with essays from leading scientists and commentators who examine what's at stake in our human–machine relationships. What is our future as friends, parents, lovers? Will advances in intelligent machines reverse decades of progress for women? From robot nannies to generative art and our ancient dreams of intelligent machines, The Love Makers blends storytelling with science communication to investigate the challenges and opportunities of emergent technologies and how we want to live.
Contributors
Ronny Bogani, Joanna J. Bryson, Julie Carpenter, Stephen Cave, Anita Chandran, Peter R. N. Childs, Kate Devlin, Kanta Dihal, Mary Flanagan, Margaret Rhee, Amanda Sharkey, Roberto Trotta, E. R. Truitt, Richard Watson
Hardcover
$29.95 T ISBN: 9781912685844 360 pp. | 6 in x 7.75 inReviews
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Campbell's fourth novel is a suspenseful, plausible near-future road trip that is published alongside 14 essays by experts in fields ranging from robotics and artificial intelligence to law and ethics...This book, created with the aim of raising awareness of potential social impacts of developing trends in technology, provides much to think about. It deserves attention.
The Guardian
Endorsements
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"Wild, innovative and alive with intelligence and imagination, Aifric Campbell's novel is a dark Thelma and Louise road-trip for the AI generation."
Arifa Akbar
chief theater critic, the Guardian; author of Consumed
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"Keenly intelligent and deeply humane, The Love Makers is an essential handbook on the ways in which artificial intelligence has already changed the relationships between human beings, and will only continue to do so. The novel, Scarlett and Gurl, is a brilliant exploration of all the subtle ways in which AI will challenge our understanding of motherhood, friendship, and romantic love; combined with the accompanying essays and poems, it paints a vivid picture of a future that is both startlingly different and uncannily familiar, and demands that we pay closer attention to the way we treat each other now."
Louisa Hall
author of Trinity and Speak