Artificial Wisdom by Thomas R. Weaver

 Artificial Wisdom

 by Thomas R. Weaver

Salvation Has A Price

Artificial Wisdom by Thomas R. Weaver

 was published on 5th OCtober 2023 by Chainmaker Press.

My thanks to the author and publisher for sending me a copy to review and to 

Literally PR for inviting me to take part on the Book Tour.

Synopsis

It’s 2050, a decade after a heatwave that killed four hundred million across the Persian Gulf, including journalist Marcus Tully’s wife. Now he must uncover the truth: was the disaster natural? Or is the weather now a weapon of genocide? A whistleblower pulls Tully into a murder investigation at the centre of an election battle for a global dictator, with a mandate to prevent a climate apocalypse. A former US President campaigns against the first AI politician for the position, but someone is trying to sway the outcome. Tully must convince the world to face the truth and make hard choices about the future of the species. But will humanity ultimately choose salvation over freedom, whatever the cost? An enthralling murder mystery with a vividly realised future world, forcing readers to grapple with hard hitting questions about the climate crisis, our relationship with Artificial Intelligence and the price we'd be willing to pay, as a species, to be saved.

Perfect for fans of Blake Crouch, Harlan Coben, Neal Stephenson, Philip K. Dick, Kim Stanley Robinson and RR Haywood.

My Review 

Gosh where to start with this compelling and thought provoking read. Well I suppose the best place to start is at the beginning. So, in all honesty, it took me a while to get my head, literally, around the neuro-reality, neurograins, ego spaces and nano bots. however, once I had got used to the idea that we have moved on a long way, technology wise to 2050, along with my understanding that in 27 years time we will be in a totally different field as far as this is concerned, my imagination caught up and took on board the settings and vision that Thomas has created.

The characters and storylines within the book take the reader on an interesting, and thought provoking, journey whilst wondering who is governing who , and why; and when you think you know you find out that maybe, you don't !! The journeys to find out the truth in this futuristic Murder Mystery that Tully, Livia and October embark on draw the reader into this world that may, or maybe not , the world of the future, who knows ?

This is a book that, as well as telling an incredible story , really does take you on a thought provoking journey about where the world will be in thirty years time. If we have not completely wrecked it before then, and I find it quite apt that it has just been published when we have just had the hottest September on record and October feels like it might also follow on with this trend, will we be living in a different world where being governed by AI is the norm and bubbles of being able to live "normally" exist within a world we have wrecked.

For me this is an excellent book for book clubs as there is so much material for discussion in here that the coffee cups will be needing refills before you get anywhere near agreeing on anything, if you ever do !!!!

And finally from me, if this is the type of writing and content in a debut novel, I cannot wait to read any future books by Thomas R. Weaver as I think we have also found a new author to be reckoned with.

About the Author

Alongside writing, Thomas is a tech entrepreneur. His last startup was acquired by Just Eat Takeaway. Despite swearing to family and friends (none of whom believed him) that he would never run another startup again, he recently started a new project in stealth backed by Silicon Valley's largest tech accelerator. The concept is focused on bringing some of the ideas explored in his debut novel, Artificial Wisdom, to life, specifically around communicating in augmented reality.

A NOTE FROM THOMAS R. WEAVER

I've heard it said that a first book is born out of worry. That was certainly the case for me. After Trump became US President in 2016, and the Brexit referendum tipped towards Leave, I started to worry about the impact of online manipulation and disinformation on humanity’s future. If it was so easy for (as seems likely) foreign powers to influence large groups of people in relatively unsophisticated ways, using social media bots, what would happen to us when technology, particularly AI, became more advanced? After exiting my startup in 2019, I also found myself with more time to worry about other things, in particular the climate, and what life my children would have to face in their own adult years. It terrified me that climate-denial, particularly in the US, was growing at precisely the time when the world needed to come together and put all our resources in one pot to try and find a way out of the crisis, before it was too late. This growth in denial was driven by political and media manipulation of – again – large amounts of people. Finally, I started to realise that for some countries above a certain latitude, climate change was going to unlock resources even while other countries burned. If every nation-state had different incentives, how could you even begin to solve something as truly global and interconnected as the climate? This led to the idea that, if things get too bad, we’ll need someone to make the hard decisions that individual nations won’t make, to solve things at a species level, not a national level. I was listening to my favourite podcast, Hardcore History by Dan Carlin. He has a multi-part series called Death Throes of the Republic, on the fall of the Roman Republic, and it occurred to me that the Romans had a process for this kind of thing, when faced with existential threats. They selected a dictator. When the dictator accomplished their mission (e.g. “evict the Carthaginians from Italian soil”) they would hand back power – at least until Caesar came along and kept it all for himself. All these things came together for me, and I needed to write about it to make sense of it for myself, to explore what could happen if we did and didn’t act, to understand the perils and the potential. If you could manipulate people to think or vote one way, could the same tactics be used to manipulate them to think or vote in ways that might help solve the crisis? Ethically, that’s clearly wrong. But if humanity is pushed to the brink of extinction, would it make different choices? And, more importantly, could Artificial Intelligence be a tool that helps solve this crisis? If it did, what would the cost of such salvation be? I didn’t know. I wrote Artificial Wisdom to simulate one possible future. I’m not going to claim AI or even the climate will develop along the lines I outline here. It’s fiction, after all. I’m just hoping to make people think and debate, and give people a page-turning ride along the way