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The Love Makers

The Love Makers

by Aifric Campbell

$29.95 Hardcover
eBook

360 pp., 6 x 8 in,

Hardcover
9781912685844
Published: November 23, 2021
Publisher: Goldsmiths Press

$29.95

eBook
9781912685837
Published: November 23, 2021
Publisher: Goldsmiths Press

$29.99

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How artificial intelligence and robotics are transforming the future of love and desire: a philosophical thriller and essays.

A chance encounter between two women and a road trip into the future: It's Christmas Eve, and Scarlett, banker-turned-technologist, is leaving a secret underground lab to catch the last flight that will get her home in time to open presents with her three-year-old son. She offers a lift to a young woman in distress, who shares her intimate life story as they drive to the airport. These revelations will have devastating consequences for both of them.

The Love Makers is a philosophical thriller about female friendship, class, motherhood, women, and work—and how artificial intelligence and robotics are transforming the future of love and desire.

Aifric Campbell combines her novel with essays from leading scientists and commentators who examine what's at stake in our human–machine relationships. What is our future as friends, parents, lovers? Will advances in intelligent machines reverse decades of progress for women? From robot nannies to generative art and our ancient dreams of intelligent machines, The Love Makers blends storytelling with science communication to investigate the challenges and opportunities of emergent technologies and how we want to live.

Contributors

Ronny Bogani, Joanna J. Bryson, Julie Carpenter, Stephen Cave, Anita Chandran, Peter R. N. Childs, Kate Devlin, Kanta Dihal, Mary Flanagan, Margaret Rhee, Amanda Sharkey, Roberto Trotta, E. R. Truitt, Richard Watson

Aifric Campbell is the author of three novels: On the Floor, longlisted for the International Orange Prize 2012 (now the Women's Prize for Fiction); The Loss Adjustor; and The Semantics of Murder. She spent fourteen years as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley where she became the first woman managing director on the London trading floor. Her journalism has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Irish Times, the Sunday Telegraph, the Guardian, Elle, and the Sunday Business Post. She teaches at Imperial College London.

"Wild, innovative and alive with intelligence and imagination, Aifric Campbell's novel is a dark Thelma and Louise road-trip for the AI generation."
Arifa Akbar, chief theater critic, the Guardian; author of Consumed

"Keenly intelligent and deeply humane, The Love Makers is an essential handbook on the ways in which artificial intelligence has already changed the relationships between human beings, and will only continue to do so. The novel, Scarlett and Gurl, is a brilliant exploration of all the subtle ways in which AI will challenge our understanding of motherhood, friendship, and romantic love; combined with the accompanying essays and poems, it paints a vivid picture of a future that is both startlingly different and uncannily familiar, and demands that we pay closer attention to the way we treat each other now."
Louisa Hall, author of Trinity and Speak

Campbell's fourth novel is a suspenseful, plausible near-future road trip that is published alongside 14 essays by experts in fields ranging from robotics and artificial intelligence to law and ethics...This book, created with the aim of raising awareness of potential social impacts of developing trends in technology, provides much to think about. It deserves attention.
The Guardian

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