Ever-hopeful that summer will actually arrive, the 9-2-3 team have been giving some thought to what exciting novels they might pack in their suitcases this year… and we’ve concluded that a great starting point would be The Perfect Wife, by J P Delaney.
What is it that makes you unique - that differentiates you from everyone else? Your likes and dislikes, your strengths and weaknesses? Is it your memories, perhaps? Or is it the way you see the world?
And what if those things could be controlled by someone else?Introduced to your brain? What if somebody else could select which memories were and were not available to you?
What if your talents - the things that you thought were specifically yours, nurtured and honed over a lifetime - could now be performed mechanically, according to the instructions of a third party? What if your brain could be manipulated into loving another person? And most importantly, what if other people - the wider world- could have access to your neural activity?
These are the dilemmas faced by the new Abbie Cullen-Scott. Or at least, by an AI robot version of Abbie, recreated by Abbie’s husband.
Tim creates “Abbie” to provide companionship, several years after the original Abbie Cullen- Scott goes missing, presumed dead. Abbie’s is a body that is beautifully engineered – strong, capable, and with a brain which is able to access all the information in the world, given the right permissions. And – crucially - it comes with sentience. The new Abbie is capable of thinking for herself and reaching her own conclusions. It’s an incredible thing – she is an incredible development – and the wider world watches via the media with mixed fascination and horror. But soon talk starts of commercialising Abbie. A lawsuit isn’t far behind. Abbie realises that society doesn’t fully comprehend her sentience - doesn’t understand, if you like, that she has what might be described as a soul. A personality, independent of the plastic and metal which lay beneath her rubber skin. She realises that she may soon be wiped - in effect, killing her. She is viewed only as property, rather than as a fully functioning human being. And as the story unravels, it becomes increasingly clear that not all is as it seems. Does anyone believe that Abbie has a right to self-determination, even those closest to her?
I read this book in a single sitting; it offered surprises up to the very end. It does sometimes require the reader to suspend disbelief, and not every single detail knits together perfectly, but the desire for a resolution is by that point so strong that it manages to carry you over these minor blips. It raises increasingly pertinent questions about what constitutes sentience. It asks whether re-creating new neural networks in AI machines would give rise to new moral or legal rights and indeed new, truly-independent beings. It invites you to wonder whether AI individuals would be able to act in a random and unexpected way or whether, in the end, every step they take is planned out carefully. It considers the difference between reality and illusion, and what those terms actually mean.
There are darker themes also. The book addresses the inevitable possibility that AI “people” will be exploited by others for commercial gain in a way that would be unacceptable in solely human populations. It doesn’t shy away from difficult issues about nefarious control. It deals with the thorny issue of whether AI machines will always fully embrace human empathy or whether they will sometimes make decisions, however unpalatable, based on their own self interest or survival.
But it also portrays a world in which truly personal and independent responses - love and attachment - can arise out of a recreated neural network. A world in which an artificial human can feel genuine emotion and do the right thing, even at enormous personal cost. And to that extent, perhaps it does offer a partial response to the ultimate question: what makes us human?