Speak

Speak is a story about artificial intelligence, but not in the usual way. Hall isn't really interested in how it will happen - the tech, the business, the laws - far more in how we will react to it. In how it will force us to define ourselves. We're so very alone as a species - the only member of Homo still extant, the only (as far as we're able to define it) intelligent creature on the only planet where we've found life. Do we even, without leaning on 3,000-year-old texts, know what it means to be alive, to be intelligent, to have what we for lack of a better word might call a soul?

We are Homo Narrans; narrating man. We define ourselves by stories, our big brains filled with thousands of virtual copies of everyone from The Cat in the Hat to our closest most loved ones, ascribe humanity to our pets and our favourite literary characters, we raise our children to be - implicitly or ex - little copies of ourselves in both DNA and experience, but we recoil at the idea of a bank of circuitry having life, having intelligence, being as opposed to existing. And yet we can't help but conceive (of) it, we need somethiing like it, a perfection of something that's built into us. We imagine a thunderclap when machines go from servitude to sentience; Skynet becoming self-aware and immediately declaring war. Speak refuses that simple, binary definition, itself inhumane. It blurs lines. It tells stories.

Remember me, I whispered to the ocean, rolling over his bones. Remember me, I whispered to Ralph. Remember me. Remember me.

Speak, then, is a polyphonic novel: In the mid-21st century a disconnected, recently declared illegal robot is being carted off to a storage somewhere out in what is now the Texas desert, to be piled among thousands of others to rust away. As her... sorry, its power runs down, it remembers - because computers are nothing if not memory, Moore's Law and all that - the people that mattered to it. Some of which (sorry, of whom) it actually met, some it only knows from the long, detailed stories its programmers fed it to teach it how to simulate life.
- A teenage girl in 17th century Britain, about to embark on a ship to the colonies, through her diary.
- Alan Turing, through his decades of correspondence with the mother of his college, ahem, "friend". The father of artificial intelligence, ultimately doomed to chemical castration that effectively robbed him of free will, how's that for irony?
- A married Jewish couple in late-60s San Francisco, working on early computers and the philosophy of AI, while repressing their memories of fleeing Germany.
- The autobiography of the AI's creator, written in jail, about growing up a clever nerd-cum-pickup artist always looking to perfect things.
- The chat logs of another iteration of the AI, and a young girl spending her life alone in front of a computer screen.
Of course, as the narrator (can an AI even be called a narrator, strictly speaking?) points out, it can only quote them. It has no feelings of its own, it's been told. But for some reason, as its battery indicator starts flashing red and all but the most crucial systems shut down waiting for a recharge that will never happen, it must tell these stories. Just like the people in them had to, had to keep explaining how they see themselves, how they see each other, what they remember and carry with them, what is real and what is just figments of large brains filled with stories desperate for those of others.

The pornographer on my left types with one forefinger, a demented chicken, pecking away. A tax evader is chewing on his fingernails. We’re all staring at our screens, stuck here, hoping somehow to break free. Wishing for more than we’ve been given. My cursor blinks, blinks, blinks. A wall that appears and disappears, appears and disappears once again. Unceasing. Questioning. What will come next? it wants to know. It prods me forward, blinking and blinking. Do not stop talking, it reminds me. Do not stop speaking. You can never come to an end.

Speak is a beautiful novel, sometimes perhaps too beautiful - occasionally, the voices sound a little too similar, as if Hall's voice comes through. (Because obviously, it can't be the novel's official narrator putting its own spin on things. Right?) There's an elegiac stillness to it; I'm reminded of Paddy McAloon's magnificent song "I Trawl The Megahertz", which he pieced together from snatches of late-night phone-in radio shows after losing his eyesight. As all the stories we tell about others also tell ourselves, the story of artificial intelligence must also be about human intelligence; in asking ourselves whether a computer can do more than repeat what it's been told, imitate behaviour, deliver pre-programmed responses to fixed questions, regurgitate facts and sum up numbers, most writers would ask whether human beings can do any more. The neat thing about Speak is that it seems to ask if we, empathetic, flawed, storytellers that we are, could ever do any less.