THE STRENGTH OF THE ILLUSION
As the story opens, a coder named Ty is flying with his activist girlfriend, Zora, to attend a wedding, but this seemingly prosaic activity is overshadowed by Ty’s work at startup Opel, where he and a colleague strive to create tech that’s different from run-of-the-mill apps: “We wanted the computer to produce God’s work, or at least to do so if asked.” As such, Opel’s AI software “crawled, parsed, interpreted, counted, multiplied, transformed, translated, recalled, remembered, and read the world to which we connected it,” Ty narrates. “If it happened digitally …there was a good chance that it happened with our company watching.” As the novel progresses, the expanding tentacles of this machine-learning tool engulf the whole of the narrative, all played out against an ironic disconnect as humans are shown to be intellectually incurious compared to the AI: “In meetings,” Ty confesses, “we talked schemata and queries, language and architecture, but never read any literature ourselves.” Moore tells the story at a deliberately feverish pitch, loading his relatively simple story with philosophical rhetoric: “With sensations being stochastic, with my morals being patterns, and with my mind being a narrative,” goes a typical passage, “I had proof, or something close enough to it, that I could do with myself as I saw fit.” However, the prose style sometimes results in moments that are nearly incomprehensible: “As the fluid drained from the fatty pads underneath my eyes, I would claw at my mandibles, clear my throat, and wriggle my legs in an attempt to escape that needling pain just on the other side of urgent.” For the most part, though, it ably portrays its characters’ weird, off-kilter genius.
