The Love Makers
Aifric Campbell
Publication
It’s Christmas Eve when Scarlett leaves an underground tech 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, but these revelations will have devastating consequences for both of their lives.
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? What is the future of love? 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
Wild, innovative and alive with intelligence and imagination, Aifric Campbell's novel is a dark Thelma and Louise road-trip for the AI generation.
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.