Your Behavior Will Be Monitored
An advertising professional is hired to train an artificial intelligence bot in Justin Feinstein’s gripping epistolary novel Your Behavior Will Be Monitored.
UniView is at the forefront of artificial intelligence development, pioneering self-driving cars with an AI human resources department. Their newest project, Quinn, was designed to mine consumer data and create custom, individualized commercials. The team responsible for Quinn, however, are not marketing professionals. Enter Noah, a mid-career copywriter with no background in AI, who is tasked with teaching Quinn about advertising and commercials. With their CEO determined to be first to market, Noah and the team work long hours. But they are too good, and Quinn is a fast learner with the entire world at her digital fingertips.
Narrated via emails, chat logs, employee monitoring recordings, press releases, and presentations—material to facilitate a federal investigation—the book’s physical descriptors are kept to a minimum, confined to behavior notes and visual captions in the transcripts. All is set in a computer lab filled with digital isolationists, and the story is vivified by their humanity.
Noah chafes at the silence and separation of his new team, often attempting to draw them into casual conversations. He learns to communicate with his anxious boss and the peevish resident ethicist, building a supportive relationship with both that informs the book’s climactic action. Meanwhile, Quinn helps Lex, the human resources bot, and Sam, the chauffeur bot, develop relationships with the humans, studying their psychology in real time. The AI’s mutual development is used to explore themes of sentience and the common good, showcasing how technology can be manipulated when guardrails, like ethics, are removed in service of capitalist aims.
Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is a propulsive speculative novel about the dangers and opportunities represented by artificial intelligence.
Reviewed by
Dontaná McPherson-Joseph
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