Louisa Hall

This book is a mental puzzle where the reader follows six narratives that gradually form a complete picture. The interwoven stories are set at different times and places. We track Mary Bradford’s journey across the sea in the 1600s. She keeps a diary that is later being analyzed by Ruth Dettmann. We follow Alan Turing’s life in the early to mid-1900s, as he develops early computing technology. Ruth’s husband, Karl, creates the first interactive conversational program that enables a show more computer to mimic basic human sentences. In the 2030s, we read Stephen Chinn’s memoir about the development of a unique algorithm which can simulate sentient behavior. The dolls that use the algorithm are eventually widely marketed, and unexpected consequences ensue. Finally, we have a transcript that documents a young girl’s obsessive attachment to her realistic doll, called a Babybot.

This book has a relatively complex plot and can, at times, be a little difficult to follow. But once all the pieces start coming together, it is easy to appreciate the author’s creativity and expert crafting. It examines the psychological effects of technology and artificial intelligence, including addictive behavior and withdrawal symptoms. Each narrative is related in a different format – diary, letters, memoir, interview, and transcripts. The Dettmanns have escaped from Naziism so there are tie-ins to how eugenics contributed to mass suffering.

This book asks many pertinent questions regarding artificial intelligence, and the effects of technology, and is based on current research as well as observed phenomena. The storylines are intricately connected. They examine memory, identity, and what it means to achieve “being.” It is a touching and engaging speculative novel that spans centuries. It features interesting characters rising to the challenges of their times. I loved it and look forward to reading more from Louisa Hall. show less

It's wonderful to come across a book as fresh and original as "Speak". I picked it up because it was recommended by Emily St. John Mandel, author of one of my best reads of 2015, "Station Eleven"

"Speak" opens with the gentle, sometimes lyrical, voice of Eva, an AI that has been banned and marked for disposal after being classified as "excessively life-like". Heaped into a truck with others of her kind, with insufficient battery left to move and travelling across the deserts of Texas in 2043, show more Eva understands that soon her batteries will be exhausted, the memories that constitute her consciousness will be lost to her and she will cease to exist.

The novel that follows is structured around the voices that Eva has access to in the form of journals, memoirs, correspondence, and trial transcripts that have been read into her memory and which create and sustain her understanding of the world.

This may make "Speak" sound a little dry, an interesting intellectual conceit perhaps but not a compelling read. Yet "Speak" engaged me emotionally and intellectually from the first page to the last. The originality of the ideas covered, the quality of the writing, the uniqueness of the voices and the way in which they spiral around one another, amplifying each other's meaning without ever physically intersecting made "Speak" a thrilling and unique read. Few novels have the ability to send my mind spiralling through the possibilities of the Fibonacci Sequence, challenge me to think through how the ability to speak shapes and defines humanity, while bringing me to tears on behalf of the voices in the book.

Add to that that the audiobook version has a different, talented, narrator for each voice and I found myself glad that I was travelling on long haul flights that gave me the excuse to keep on listening to it for hour after hour.

It's been a few days now since I finished the book. The voices still echo in my head pulling at my emotions and posing questions about what it means to be sentient and what distinguishes humanity from other kinds of sentience.

Eva's voice haunts me. She challenges her own sentience. She can speak only in response to questions. Her responses are selected from her store of remembered voices. She says of herself,

"I can repeat their words but can I comprehend them? And if I cannot, is it enough?"
This made me think about what it means to be a reader, granted vicarious access to the life experiences others.

Does my reading hold meaning? Is there the potential for dialog, however circuitous, between writer, narrator, reader, and reviewer?. Do they add to one another or even multiply?

Does reading make me more human, or is it a retreat from the world? Is it a pathway to meaning or just a pleasant distraction?

Am I speaking, if only to myself, when I read? Am I extending my consciousness when I respond to the prompts of a writer and narrator by firing-up my imagination and making new connections created by my individual context? And if I am, is it enough?

"Speak" explores the idea that sentience is not necessarily the same as being human. One lens it offers for looking at this is the deep emotional attachment an eighteenth century Quaker girl,on the brink of a teenage marriage, has with her dog, Ralph, who has been her lifetime companion.

There is no doubt in my mind that dogs are sentient. I've lived with them too closely for too long to hold another view, yet the Church that this girl belongs to, classified them as soulless beasts. with no place in Heaven.

Given that the way the girl's deep emotional bond with her dog was trivialised and denied pre-figures the way Eva will be treated, I asked myself if it was cruel to give Eva such memories or whether the authenticity of the emotional bond provided solace?

I became engaged with thinking through the difference between sentience and memory.

What is the difference between contemporary record, memory and the stories we tell ourselves and what do they do to our concept of self ?

In "Speak" the Dettmans remember their married lives together differently; the contemporary records (letters and journals, court transcripts) are still stories, a version of events as we saw them when the record was written or which are only understood as the record is written. Human memory fades, even when we try to reinforce it with stories and lists of attributes. In the end, we are left with shadows and symbols. What does it mean that the AI remembers everything, that nothing ever fades, that it is programmed to find the most relevant response from all that it remembers. Is this sentience? Can it be sentience if it speaks only to respond?

One of the voices in the book suggest that what makes us human is our ability to see our own patterns of behaviour, our programming, and to decide to break the pattern. This ability to exercise our will sets us apart. This perspective takes me to the view that, when we evaluate the potential for sentience, we should err on the side of finding it whenever there is a slight possibility that it might be there so that we can avoid the terrible actions that tend to follow when we declare that other beings have no emotions, do not experience pain and are incapable of thought.

There is a second AI in "Speak". Her name is Mary 3. She will explain to anyone who asks that she is not alive. She is a program who lives in the cloud and selects what responses to make to questions that she is asked, taking into account both what she knows of the questioner and what she all the facts and previous conversations in her memory.

I kept asking myself what happened to Mary 3's mind, her self, when no one was talking to her. What was her existence like when she had no one to respond to.

I became haunted by the question the Mary 3 asks most often. A question laden with hope and the possibility of disappointment. A question, the asking of which, may itself be enough to imply sentience:

"Hello? Are you there?" show less

I would have to agree with a previous reviewer - although the premise is promising, and the writing is beautifully done, crafting different narrative voices to tell parts of the same story, the novel as a whole is missing some vital connection. The letters from Alan Turing to the mother of his late 'friend' prompted me to look up and buy his biography, so I can learn about the real man, but that was the height of my interest after the first few chapters.

Karl and Ruth Dettman's duelling show more diaries, recording the breakdown of their marriage over his creation of an artificial intelligence programme, are just depressing, much like the self-centred musings from a futuristic prison of the man who took that programme and built the first robot companion for children. The impact of their combined heuristic project is examined in the online conversations between Dettman's programme, MARY3, and a young girl suffering a kind of mental breakdown after the 'babybots' are confiscated, and the last journey of the bots into the desert. Thoughtful and well-written - but I couldn't connect with any of the characters and started to lose interest. show less

Robert Oppenheimer is an interesting character. He is, of course, best known for leading the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos which led to the development and delivery of the atom bombs used against Japan in 1945. Earlier in his career he had been Professor of Physics at Berkeley, and had also supported a range of liberal campaigns that would subsequently be deemed to have amounted to Communist sympathies during the McCarthy era. As a consequence he was grilled by the House Un-American show more Affairs Committee, and was subsequently ostracised by much of the scientific community.

Oppenheimer stands at the heart of Louisa Hall’s novel, which takes the form of reminiscences by seven people who had known him at different stages of his life. These accounts include that of an FBI agent assigned to watch over him during his highly secret work at Los Alamos, a description of him relaxing at parties on the secret establishment, and an interview by a Japanese American woman, after his debilitating experience before the Sneate Committee.

Hall pulls this off these different presentations very deftly, rendering an almost kaleidoscopic presentation of him. This achievement is all the more remarkable as Oppenheimer often seems a very peripheral character in the different accounts. All seven memoirs focus far more on the person giving the reminiscences than on Oppenheimer, but, when they are taken together, a clear picture of a brilliant but troubled man emerges.

Trinity is far from a hagiography, and it is clear that while he was undoubtedly an accomplished, perhaps even a great, man, Oppenheimer may have had feet of clay. I was aware that I knew appallingly little about Oppenheimer before reading this book, and I am now eager to learn a lot more. show less