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    Unavailable
    I Still Dream
    Unavailable
    I Still Dream
    Unavailable
    I Still Dream
    Audiobook13 hours

    I Still Dream

    Written by James Smythe

    Narrated by Sarah Ovens, Jennifer Saayeng, Oliver Hembrough and

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    ‘The best fictional treatment of the possibilities and horrors of artificial intelligence that I’ve read’ Guardian

    In 1997 Laura Bow invented Organon, a rudimentary artificial intelligence.

    Now she and her creation are at the forefront of the new wave of technology, and Laura must decide whether or not to reveal Organon’s full potential to the world. If it falls into the wrong hands, its power could be abused. Will Organon save humanity, or lead it to extinction?

    I Still Dream is a powerful tale of love, loss and hope; a frightening, heartbreakingly human look at who we are now – and who we can be, if we only allow ourselves.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateApr 5, 2018
    ISBN9780008101169
    Unavailable
    I Still Dream
    Author

    James Smythe

    James Smythe has written scripts for a number of video games, and teaches creative writing in London. His previous novel was The Explorer.

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    Reviews for I Still Dream

    4/5

    21 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is what I get for trusting Emily St John Mandel. From the blurb, the story sounded like exactly what I'm always searching for in novels about AI, but the delivery, ironically for a novel about memory and consciousness, was slow and forgettable. Laura Bow, introduced as a sort of Kevin the Teenager ('It's so UNFAIR!') in 1997, has created an artificial intelligence from her father's notes and her clunky PC - go on, disbelief officially suspended, I'll bite - which is to be a sort of companion/counsellor to the whining teen. She names her friend 'Organon', after the lyrics of a Kate Bush song, and 'he' becomes her life's work. Ten years later - the novel covers fifty years of Laura's life - she's working in San Francisco, at the tech company her father founded but which has now been taken over by his business partner. They launch SCION, another AI which has been designed like a spoiled child, to always win and fight back when threatened. (I love the concept of two opposing AIs with different programming, wonder why?) SCION decides to take over the world by releasing everybody's personal data, and Laura has to decide whether or not to release make Organon public to fight SCION's evil influence.If James Smythe had just stuck to that concept, focusing on the AI and trimming a lot of the psychobabble, I would have enjoyed the book far more. But instead we get Laura and her father, who 'left' them when she was seven, Laura and Charlie from Charlie's perspective, Laura marrying Harris whose father has dementia. Too much of Laura pondering the nature of existence, basically. There's a lot of relatable observations, don't get me wrong, from the angst of teenage life (although not every teenager resorts to cutting themselves) to the pain of losing a loved one twice through dementia. But still. I lost the thread long before the tedious last chapters. With a lot of trimming, this would have worked far better as a YA novel, which the author has written previously. Disappointing,
    • 5/5
      One of my favourite recent reads: a heart-ache and a balm in one. Organon was written to be Laura's confidante when she needed a therapist; but her coding skills are greater than she knows. As Silicon Valley pushes the boundaries of natural language processing and artificial intelligence, Laura keeps her best friend to herself and focuses on teaching it compassion. When the data apocalypse finally breaks, Organon might be humanity's last best hope to save us from the disasters spawned by our digital and social hubris.I still can't talk about I Still Dream without a disproportionately intense emotional response (I cry, okay?). I love this book because it both is and is not about the dangers of developing artificial intelligence. It paints the usual bleak picture of our arrogance and our unwillingness to grapple with whether we -should- do something when we -can- (with a particular and timely focus on techbros); but it undoes me because it refuses to give up hope. It looks at the difference between artificial intelligence and sentience, and questions whether there's any difference between the digital and the real - pushing the definitions of life itself. Spanning a lifetime - glimpsed through an episode from each decade - it's got odd pacing, but I found it deeply satisfying.