Book review: Confessions of a sentient AI algorithm

Author of 'The Confessions' Paul Bradley Carr, who owns a bookshop in Palm Springs, takes a dim view of those not addicted to the written word.

• The Confessions 
• Paul Bradley Carr 
• Faber, £9.99 

I notice agents and publishers are now advising writers not to send them books about artificial intelligence. 

The dystopian AI potboiler appears to be ubiquitous, but Paul Bradley Carr wisely got in ahead of the rush —  The Confessions depicts a world gone slightly madder than ours.

In a proximate future, the western world is run by LLIAM, a benign and all-knowing AI algorithm capable of dispensing advice on everything from quantum physics to relationships, or how to make an omelette. 

Billions of people have happily outsourced their decision-making to this invisible entity, and calamity ensues when LLIAM suddenly shuts down.

“Almost a billion users suddenly left without the ability to make even the most basic decision,” writes Carr. “The entire Western world, paralysed by infinite choices.” 

Could we ever evolve into such hopeless dimwits? We have the capacity.

As transport networks, financial institutions, and even governments come crashing to a halt, LLIAM’s malfunction has caused an even bigger problem. 

Because prior to shutting down, the algorithm sent millions of letters to people all over Europe and the Americas, divulging the darkest secrets of spouses and relatives, in which LLIAM now feels it conspired.

The AI appears to have achieved sentience, and retreated in horror from all the dreadful things humanity has asked it to do.

In the firing line for all this is Kaitlin Goss, the statuesque and highly paid CEO of LLIAM’s parent company StoicAI, who was about to close a hugely lucrative deal granting LLIAM control of the US military.

And as she races against time to solve the problem, she is haunted by a great sin, and seeks the help of Maud Brookes, a former nun who ‘raised’ LLIAM and now lives off the grid.

The plot of The Confessions basically boils down to that famous line from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, when the computer HAL tells the ship’s captain, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

And the book pivots on the moment, which many experts believe is inevitable, when a computer would not merely know a great deal of things, but begin to understand them, “to become exponentially more intelligent without human intervention — to learn”.

The writer makes the leap to imagining a machine or algorithm evolving emotions, ethics, and a consequently dim view of ours.

There are interesting details, for instance the massive amounts of water needed to cool these giant AI systems, the bewildering and labyrinthine maze of tech involved, and interesting themes too, such as the idea that people would use the advice of an all-knowing AI as an excuse for their worst excesses. 

Also, the notion that AI might become a useful psychological substitute for God. A tenuous connection to the Confessions of Saint Augustine is, perhaps mercifully, left unexplored.

Carr’s style is rather pulpy: at one point, Kaitlin Goss’s heart “pumped against her ribs, and her mind raced to close the gap between dream state and reality!.

Elsewhere: “Down? The word hit Kaitlin like a ski.” But this any-word-will-do approach to sentence structure is not without its benefits: 

One’s eye is never distracted by elegant phrases, leaving the mind free to focus on the plot, which barrels with unseemly haste towards its breathless, all-action conclusion.

There is even a Russian villain. Perhaps someone will make a film out of it.

And Carr, who owns a bookshop in Palm Springs, takes a dim view of those not addicted to the written word.

Kaitlin Goss, for instance, has no time for reading, and at one point we hear the sombre news that “it had been a very long time since Kaitlin had set foot in a library”. No wonder her world has gone to shit.