Good grief, remind me never to buy a house with built in AI!
That's what Nikki and Ethan do, with their seven year old daughter, Bella. They're trying to recover from the nightmare of losing Bella's twin, Grace, in an accident a couple of years earlier and moving house is one way of trying to deal with that. From a common or garden home they move to 17 Church Row, a house where the doors have no handles, everything is automated and most importantly there's Alice. Aliceis probably the most sophisticated piece of artificial intelligence you could find. She is intuitive and helpful and the family start to rely on her completely.
This is where things start to go a bit awry. I won't go into what happens but it's a stark lesson in the possibilities of computers and what they are capable of. I don't know whether the things that happened in the book could actually happen but I suspect there's much in this book that is possible with the right components and processing power.
It's an intense and exciting storyline, and I thought it was inspired too. These are our modern day nightmares, the idea that computers can turn on us. I'm all for technology but I think I would draw the line at something that did everything for me. It can never be good to give over all control to anybody or anything, can it?
I thought 17 Church Row was a really well plotted story with a twist in the middle that I didn't guess at all. This is very much a plot-driven story rather than a character one (unless you include Alice as she's very much the driving force in this book). I couldn't turn the pages quickly enough whilst reading this dark and clever story.
That's what Nikki and Ethan do, with their seven year old daughter, Bella. They're trying to recover from the nightmare of losing Bella's twin, Grace, in an accident a couple of years earlier and moving house is one way of trying to deal with that. From a common or garden home they move to 17 Church Row, a house where the doors have no handles, everything is automated and most importantly there's Alice. Aliceis probably the most sophisticated piece of artificial intelligence you could find. She is intuitive and helpful and the family start to rely on her completely.
This is where things start to go a bit awry. I won't go into what happens but it's a stark lesson in the possibilities of computers and what they are capable of. I don't know whether the things that happened in the book could actually happen but I suspect there's much in this book that is possible with the right components and processing power.
It's an intense and exciting storyline, and I thought it was inspired too. These are our modern day nightmares, the idea that computers can turn on us. I'm all for technology but I think I would draw the line at something that did everything for me. It can never be good to give over all control to anybody or anything, can it?
I thought 17 Church Row was a really well plotted story with a twist in the middle that I didn't guess at all. This is very much a plot-driven story rather than a character one (unless you include Alice as she's very much the driving force in this book). I couldn't turn the pages quickly enough whilst reading this dark and clever story.