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Jo Lenaghan - Five Way Interview

Jo Callaghan works full time as a senior strategist, where she has carried out research into the impact of AI and genomics on the future workforce. After losing her husband to cancer in 2019 when she was just forty-nine, she started writing In the Blink of an Eye, her debut SF crime novel which explores learning to live with loss and what it means to be human. She lives with her two children in the Midlands and the second book in the series, Leave No Trace, is published in the UK on March 28th.

Why police procedural?

I’ve been writing fiction for 14 years, and although In the Blink of an Eye is my UK debut, before this I wrote five unpublished books for children and young adults. Partly this was because I wanted to write about time travel and other big ideas, but also because my children were young at the time, so that was what I was mostly reading. Then as they grew older, I returned to reading more adult books in general and crime fiction in particular. I’ve always loved big ideas, and the best crime books explore the nature of humanity, theories of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, chaos versus order and fate and free will. Plus, crime writers have a lot of fun! There are so many book festivals and the crime writing community is very strong and supportive. So, a few years ago I decided to try and write a crime novel. Writing a police procedural allowed me to ground the story in reality and introduce an AI Detective in a believable way for people who maybe wouldn’t ordinarily pick up a book about artificial intelligence.

Why this book?

I started writing this book less than two months after my husband died from cancer as a way of distracting myself from my grief so I could stay strong for my children. I initially wrote it as a way of processing a lot of things, so it tells the story of Kat, a middle-aged detective who returns to work after the loss of her husband, and reluctantly agrees to pilot the use of an Artificially Intelligent Detecting Entity, AIDE Lock. Because I was drawn to stories of love and loss, the plot centres around two missing boys, but as the story developed, it became more about the way we make decisions, and what it means to be human. Kat is someone who acts according to her ‘gut instinct’ whereas Lock is driven by algorithms and evidence, and so there is a lot of conflict (and fun!) between their two different approaches. I was drawn to the idea of an AI detective because in my day job I was researching the potential impact of AI on the future healthcare workforce, and that made me wonder could you have an AI detective, and what would happen if you did…

AI clearly has a lot to offer to the police, but in reality, would it be better kept to the backroom?

I worked really hard to show both the potential benefits and threats of AI in policing in the novel, so that readers can make up their own mind, and hopefully become more informed and engaged in these important debates. As Malcom Gladwell argues in Blink, so-called ‘gut instinct’ is the result of thought-processes that are too rapid for most of us to recognise, and  are often informed by prejudices and assumptions about age, gender, and race. We know from recent high-profile cases in the UK that the current police force suffers from racism and misogyny, so on the plus side, AI could help bring more transparent and evidence-based decision making into policing decisions. But of course, AI is only as good as the data it is trained on, and there is evidence that it can lead to more biased decisions. 

I wrote a couple of articles about the role of AI in policing that explore these issues more. Essentially I believe we should be more proactive in deciding how we want to live and work as humans – what Keynes called perfecting the art of life, and use that to determine what AI should/should not do. Otherwise, AI will be driven by what it is technically capable of, leaving the role of humans to be decided by default. 

What’s next?

Book 2, Leave No Trace, will be published on March 28th in the UK, and I am currently working on book 3. I still work full time, and both kids are still at home, so it made me envious to read some of your other interviewees who answered this question with ‘a rest’.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Book 3! It is a series, because I want to explore just how much AIDE Lock might be capable of learning, and what happens when they do. I’m looking forward to exploring ideas that have always fascinated me, such as the idea of consciousness, and how no one really knows what another person – whether AI or not – is really thinking. That’s why I chose a quote from B.F. Skinner as the epigraph to book 1: ‘The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.’

Photograph by Edward Moss


 

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