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2040 (SF) - Pedro Domingos ****

This is in many ways an excellent SF satire - Pedro Domingos never forgets that part of his job as a fiction writer is to keep the reader engaged with the plot, and it's a fascinating one. There is one fly in the ointment in the form of a step into heavy-handed humour that takes away its believability - satire should push the boundaries but not become totally ludicrous. But because the rest of it is so good, I can forgive it.

The setting is the 2040 US presidential election, where one of the candidates is an AI-powered robot. The AI is the important bit - the robot is just there to give it a more human presence. This is a timely idea in its own right, but it gives Domingos an opportunity not just to include some of the limits and possibilities of generative AI, but also to take a poke at the nature of Silicon Valley startups, and of IT mega-companies and their worryingly powerful (and potentially deranged) leaders.

Domingos knows his stuff on AI as a professor of computer science who has specialised in it - I wasn't too enthused by his non-fiction book The Master Algorithm (though it was ahead of its time in 2015) but here he puts across the mix of promise and hype around AI in an excellent fashion. Also, the way he handles the pull between politics and IT, plus the relationship between the entrepreneur and the tech guy in a startup - not to mention spearing many of the worse aspects of US politics - is impressive. It's all too easy with this kind of satire not to care about what happens to the protagonists, because they are too unreal in their exaggerated forms - but here I genuinely would like to know what happens next and would be interested in a sequel.

Let me get that fly in the ointment out of the way. The (Republican) robotic Presibot's Democrat opponent is a white used-car salesman pretending to be a Native American chieftain who wants to destroy the USA and revert to solely indigenous ownership. Despite this, he is neck-and-neck in the polls with Presibot. Although you can see what Domingos is exaggerating to make a point here, it goes way too far to be in any sense believable.

Back on the good bits, though, there is also a very impressive twist in the way that, after a disaster, a later Presibot version is implemented which takes on the nature of democracy and is part of the reason I'd like to see a sequel. Overall, if you can overlook Chief Raging Bull it's an excellent piece of fiction.

I don't claim any prescience here, but I have written two short stories, one involving a disembodied AI attempting to become president of a coders' union and another with a robotic AI US presidential candidate where its makers realise things will have to be very different if their candidate wins...

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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