Cartoonist Amy Kurzweil (Flying Couch) returns to graphic memoir with Artificial: A Love Story, a thought-provoking examination of family and identity, artificial intelligence, and the nature of creativity. Kurzweil breaks the narrative into eight distinct sections, each with its own title and epigraph, but before the first section is a two-page spread of two linear strips.
These introductory strips extend beyond the page, giving the impression of time and events before and after those depicted. Kurzweil is present in each segment, and in each, the artist's father, famed futurist and writer Ray Kurzweil, asks the same important question: "Hey, Amy. What's the meaning of life?" Kurzweil's appearance--and her answer--changes slightly over the course of the panels, but in the final sequence, she leaves the question unanswered.
The narrative itself focuses on three main components: Amy Kurzweil's relationship with her partner, Jacob; Ray Kurzweil's effort to reanimate his father, Fred Kurzweil, through an AI chatbot built from his father's writing; and Fred, a pianist and conductor whose musical talent made possible his escape from the Nazis and passage to the United States. All three generations are remarkably creative, and all three are what Kurzweil calls "documenters," those who strive to hold on to information and make sense of it. Of her father, Kurzweil says, "he became an inventor not only to record human affairs, but to change them. As he says, every question needs an answer; and every problem, a solution." With his work in computer science and the Singularity ("a period of profound cultural and evolutionary change in which computers will outthink the brain and allow people... to live forever"), Ray Kurzweil knows plenty about changing human affairs and answering impossible questions, and readers will be intrigued with this timely and fascinating look behind the scenes. But even those with little interest in AI will connect with the desire to feel known and loved, across time and distance and even across generations.
Like the algorithm driving her grandfather's chatbot, Kurzweil incorporates snippets of text (articles, interviews, journal entries, e-mails) as she sifts through three generations of memories, and through it all, she asks excellent questions: What remains of a person once they've died? Is language enough? What is the meaning of life? In this case, Kurzweil may disagree with her father, arguing that some questions might not be answerable, just as "None of us are fully knowable. But with time and attention, with close looking, we are all loveable." Artificial is a wide-ranging and intellectual memoir, one that insists on the growth that comes through uncertainty. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian
Shelf Talker: Artificial: A Love Story uses thought-provoking concepts of artificial intelligence and machine learning to explore big issues: family and identity and the nature of creativity.