Artificial
A Love Story
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Living Now Book Award
Finalist for the American Book Fest Best Book Awards
A visionary story of three generations of artists whose search for meaning and connection transcends the limits of life
How do we relate to—and hold—our family’s past? Is it through technology? Through spirit? Art, poetry, music? Or is it through the resonances we look for in ourselves?
In Artificial, we meet the Kurzweils, a family of creators who are preserving their history through unusual means. At the center is renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who has long been saving the documents of his deceased father, Fredric, an accomplished conductor and pianist from Vienna who fled the Nazis in 1938.
Once, Fred’s life was saved by his art: an American benefactor, impressed by Fred’s musical genius, sponsored his emigration to the United States. He escaped just one month before Kristallnacht.
Now, Fred has returned. Through AI and salvaged writing, Ray is building a chatbot that writes in Fred’s voice, and he enlists his daughter, cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, to help him ensure the immortality of their family’s fraught inheritance.
Amy’s deepening understanding of her family’s traumatic uprooting resonates with the creative life she fights to claim in the present, as Amy and her partner, Jacob, chase jobs, and each other, across the country. Kurzweil evokes an understanding of accomplishment that centers conversation and connection, knowing and being known by others.
With Kurzweil’s signature humanity and humor, in boundary-pushing, gorgeous handmade drawings, Artificial guides us through nuanced questions about art, memory, and technology, demonstrating that love, a process of focused attention, is what grounds a meaningful life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Part meditation on immortality, part profile of the author's father—inventor and artificial intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil—this finely crafted graphic family memoir from New Yorker cartoonist Kurzweil (Flying Couch) takes an intimate approach to philosophy. Ray, whose Jewish parents narrowly escaped Vienna during WWII, hopes to connect with his late musician father by creating an AI "Dadbot" derived from his somewhat cryptic journals. Though Amy's father is alive and much more knowable, there are parallels in her own pursuit to truly understand him and their shared legacies. Her comics convey echoes and meta-elements of the layered relationships between them all: an image of a skeleton hand repeated filmstrip-style is juxtaposed with her own hand holding a recording device; time spins on clock faces in a hospital waiting room; Amy's childhood photo, painted portrait, and emoji avatar populate the same page. Ray's obsessions come across as highly creative defense mechanisms. He believes information can translate to immortality, whereas Amy, who spends part of the narrative navigating a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend, an ethics professor, concludes that only love allows people to live forever. References range from Greek philosophers to Westworld, Pinocchio, and Alice in Wonderland. This melancholic yet loving investigation gets at how AI is as much about the past and what humanity has already created as it is about the future.
