Ai

One day the writer and artist James Bridle rented a hatchback, taped a smartphone to the steering wheel and installed some webcams in order to make his own self-driving car. Armed with software cut-and-pasted from the internet, his aim was to collaborate with the AI he’d thus devised and travel to Mount Parnassus, sacred to Dionysus and home of the Muses, ‘to be elevated to the peak of knowledge, craft and skill’. Just try telling that to the traffic cops. This batty project had a serious point. Bridle wanted to subvert the idea that we cede control to our dismal robot overlords every time we plug co-ordinates into the GPS.

In the future, men enjoying illicit private pleasures with their intelligent sexbots might be surprised to find that even women made from latex and circuitry can learn to talk back and say no. Or, alternatively, that their ‘love dolls’ — in the current marketing-speak — have been hacked by anarchist feminist programmers. Please enjoy the next, cyborg-mediated stage of the war of the sexes. Some men, of course, still believe that women are inherently no good with computers, a dumb prejudice that Jeanette Winterson ably rebuts in this collection of interlinked essays, with stories from early computing history and several outbursts of amusing ire. Today’s tech-bro coders might be surprised

Edward St Aubyn’s ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels were loosely autobiographical renderings of the author’s harrowing, rarefied, drug-sozzled existence. Despite their subject matter, they managed to be uplifting through the beauty in which they expressed their melancholy sentiments. After At Last, the final novel of the pentalogy, St Aubyn published Lost for Words, a prickly satire on the literary prize culture that seemed narrowly parochial for such a classy novelist. Now we have Double Blind, his tenth novel, which has what is typically referred to as a rich cast of characters. We open with Francis, a kind of St Aubyn avatar, working at Howarth, a rewilded Sussex estate clearly based on Isabella

The world of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel — let’s call it Ishville — is instantly recognisable. Our narrator, Klara, is arranging traumatic memories into comprehensible order. She is a robot, an Artificial Friend or AF, purchased as a companion for an ill teenager named Josie. Klara’s speaking voice, in a C3PO-ish way, is endearingly off-kilter: ‘I was instructed to ensure against hanky-panky.’ ‘I’m sorry. It’s my error. I don’t understand yet the rules about forgiveness.’ There is no backstory explaining when the robots were invented, and no metaphors except the one shining in the title. When Klara has been bought, she wonders what emotions she might experience if she ever

Modern advances in communication technology, computer power and medical science can sometimes be so startling as to seem almost like magic. It’s easy to get excited about it all — but what happens if we get too excited? What happens if we lean too heavily on technology, convinced that it can solve all our problems? What happens if we begin to see technology in an unrealistic, hyped-up way? These are the questions at the heart of Gemma Milne’s book. The answer — somewhat unsurprisingly — is that over-excitement is a bad thing. Hype can damage scientific progress and in some cases send it into reverse. Whether it’s in the development