Cartoonist Amy Kurzweil (Flying Couch) returns to graphic memoir with Artificial: A Love Story, a thought-provoking examination of family and identity, artificial intelligence, and the nature of creativity.
The narrative itself focuses on three main components: Kurzweil's relationship with her partner, Jacob; the artist's father, famed futurist and writer Ray Kurzweil's effort to reanimate his father, Fred Kurzweil, through an AI chatbot built from his father's writing; and Fred, a pianist and conductor whose musical talent made possible his escape from the Nazis and passage to the United States. All three generations are remarkably creative, and all three are what Kurzweil calls "documenters," those who strive to hold on to information and make sense of it. Of her father, Kurzweil says, "he became an inventor not only to record human affairs, but to change them. As he says, every question needs an answer; and every problem, a solution." With his work in computer science and the Singularity ("a period of profound cultural and evolutionary change in which computers will outthink the brain and allow people... to live forever"), Ray Kurzweil knows plenty about changing human affairs and answering impossible questions, and readers will be intrigued with this timely and fascinating look behind the scenes. But even those with little interest in AI will connect with the desire to feel known and loved, across time and distance and even across generations.
Artificial is a wide-ranging and intellectual memoir, one that insists on the growth that comes through uncertainty. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian