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It seemed like a good idea - a book that combines speculative stories about life twenty years in the future when AI has taken a large leap forward interwoven with essays about AI and the issues and technologies that are discussed in the stories. But it didn't work for me. I finished it but was tempted at several points along the way to stop.

The biggest problem is the stories. They are just not well written. The characters are not compelling, and the plots felt manufactured to make points about the particular aspect of technology that was the focus of the story. It reminded me of the problem of a lot of Soviet literature where writers of small talent wrote more for the cause of building socialism than to deliver great storytelling. There, as in this book, the unfortunate result was general mediocrity.

The essay sections were a little better, but they had their problems too. I didn't learn very much that I didn't already know. I wish that they had been just a bit more technical.

In both the stories and the essays there was an overall philosophical point of view that felt wrong to me. The basic idea is that AI will bring us wonderful benefits and that though there are some problems too, plucky humans with compassion, emotion, wit and some sort of magical vital spark that AI as depicted in this book can't have will overcome those problems. I'm not so sure about the limitations on AI, the essential good qualities of humans or our ability to use those good qualities to overcome the problems. And the problems that are described here felt like straw men, selected at least in part because they are the easy ones that we can imagine ways to solve. It's good in a way to have a book like this that can calm some irrational fears and make the good side of AI more accessible to a broad audience, but I felt that it was done here with less than full disclosure of risks and without any sort of meaningful plan for how those risks can be addressed.