“If you expand your view of life to non-biological beings, AI technology truly is alive in every possible way”
eborah Levy’s novel (Penguin, £9.99) opens with the protagonist shattering the screen of her laptop. ‘My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else,’ she writes, ‘so what I am saying is that, if it is broken, so am I.’ This inextricable link between us and our tech is something that I feel intuitively, yet a sense of suspicion underscores the reliance I have towards my devices. I can trace the origin of this disquiet back to childhood when my too-young eyes saw the movie on a grainy VHS. I went to bed that night with an irrational fear that machines would rise up against us one day, but on waking, I knew that it was nothing more than that: an irrational fear. Surely sentient tech is the stuff of science
