The Love Makers
How artificial intelligence and robotics are transforming the future of love and desire: a philosophical thriller and essays.
I’m thrilled that this wonderful book by Aifric Campbell, including fiction and non-fiction writing, has been published by MIT press.
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
My essay, “Masters and Servants: the Need for Humanities in an AI-Dominated Future“, addresses the question of what kind of skills will future technology leaders require to understand the world that AI is creating all around us. It begins by juxtaposing Alan Turing’s famous 1947 lecture, in which he sketched the idea of “machines that can learn from experience”, with the momentous defeat of Go champion Lee Sedol by the machine learning system AlphaGo in 2016.
