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Age of Extinction (SF) - Mark Gomes ****

I'm giving this dive into a dystopian AI-dominated future four stars despite some significant flaws because I enjoyed it. Mark Gomes likens the impact of AI on humanity over the next few years to one of the palaeological mass extinctions, though in this case potentially destroying a single species - us. Set in the present and near future, we see the AI-driven technology of billionaire Nolan Scent (a musky scent, I suspect) beginning to take away the majority of jobs that aren't manual labour, service industry or working on new technology.

This is bad enough in itself and certainly has potential parallels in the real world (though Gomes' timescales are wildly over-exaggerated, as you can't, for instance, set up AI-automated factories to do all manufacturing in a couple of years). But Scent also has a chip that, when implanted in the brain, leaves workers contented with their lot - so, for example, people previously doing skilled jobs are happy becoming cleaners.

The protagonists other than Scent himself are his daughter Molly, who helps him but has concerns about what's happening, an outspoken professor who is struggling to get the world to accept that the AI future dooms everyone except the tech bros, and a brilliant researcher, Ethan, who has taken the technology to the next level using a quantum computer, enabling him to give his locked-in brother the ability to interact with the outside world.

The book's structure of pseudo-factual reporting, then a personal story, then the main storyline for each of seven sections gets in the way of feeling any real engagement with the storyline and characters for the first few chapters, but once we get more of Molly and Ethan, the writing becomes more effective and I genuinely wanted to find out what happened next. The ending is, frankly, weird - but doesn't ruin the book.

I do need to mention those flaws, though. The page layout is terrible - there is no indentation of paragraphs, for example, making dialogue difficult to read. Anyone who has looked at a professionally produced book to see how it's done should have noticed this. The book could also do with an edit - for example there are changes of tense mid-paragraph, and some inconsistency - on page 58, for instance, we read 'Molly's confidence faltered...' then on page 60, later in the same scene, 'For the first time that evening, her confidence wavered.' And the dates in the 'factual reporting' sections need a serious revision with, for example, a report from 2024 being about something happening several years later.

Leaving aside the ending, there are also some issues with the technology portrayed. It's a bit unfortunate that this book has come out just as people are realising how much generative AI makes things up, probably slowing down AI takeover considerably. And the imagined neural chips have real problems: there is no evidence people would undergo brain surgery to get a job, and the chips are far too capable (not only controlling emotions, but apparently able to fix a congenital heart defect). There's also no explanation of how the economy would work - apparently most of the population would become really poor, but by cutting out the middle class, Scent would be destroying the mass market for his sales.

Despite these issues, I mostly enjoyed the ride, and it is a useful reminder of how AI and robotics have the potential to make a major impact on everyday lives.

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