The Love Makers

Aifric Campbell

Publication

Page count:
Published on:
ISBN:
Price:

It’s Christmas Eve when Scarlett leaves an underground tech lab to catch the last flight that will get her home in time to open presents with her three year-old son. She offers a lift to a young woman in distress, who shares her intimate life story as they drive to the airport, but these revelations will have devastating consequences for both of their lives.

Aifric Campbell combines her novel with essays from leading scientists and commentators who examine what’s at stake in our human–machine relationships. What is our future as friends, parents, lovers? What is the future of love? Will advances in intelligent machines reverse decades of progress for women? From robot nannies to generative art and our ancient dreams of intelligent machines, The Love Makers blends storytelling with science communication to investigate the challenges and opportunities of emergent technologies and how we want to live.

Contributors:

  • Ronny Bogani
  • Joanna J. Bryson
  • Julie Carpenter
  • Stephen Cave
  • Anita Chandran
  • Peter R. N. Childs
  • Kate Devlin
  • Kanta Dihal
  • Mary Flanagan
  • Margaret Rhee
  • Amanda Sharkey
  • Roberto Trotta
  • E. R. Truitt
  • Richard Watson

Wild, innovative and alive with intelligence and imagination, Aifric Campbell's novel is a dark Thelma and Louise road-trip for the AI generation.

Arifa Akbar, Theatre Critic, The Guardian and author of Consumed

Keenly intelligent and deeply humane, The Love Makers is an essential handbook on the ways in which artificial intelligence has already changed the relationships between human beings, and will only continue to do so. The novel, Scarlett and Gurl, is a brilliant exploration of all the subtle ways in which AI will challenge our understanding of motherhood, friendship, and romantic love; combined with the accompanying essays and poems, it paints a vivid picture of a future that is both startlingly different and uncannily familiar, and demands that we pay closer attention to the way we treat each other now.

Louisa Hall, author of Trinity and Speak

Aifric Campbell

Aifric Campbell is the author of three novels: On the Floor, longlisted for the International Orange Prize 2012 (now the Women's Prize for Fiction), The Loss Adjustor; and The Semantics of Murder. Her journalism has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Irish Times, The Sunday TelegraphThe GuardianElle and the The Sunday Business Post. She teaches at Imperial College London.