Annie Bot
On one level, Annie Bot is a keenly observed portrait of a dysfunctional — even abusive — relationship ... But Greer goes deeper, teasing out the contradictions and vulnerabilities in their relationship and showing us glimpses of the real love that Doug and Annie could have, if he were better and she were free. The ending feels rushed, but there’s a truth to this abruptness: When insupportable situations end, they end quickly. All the best stories about artificial intelligence hinge on identity: Do our memories define us? Do our bodies represent who we are? Annie Bot, astonishingly, finds new ways to ask these well-worn questions. I kept reading Annie Bot way after bedtime, partly to see if Annie could escape from her prison, but also because every few pages there was an observation that made me think about both AI and human relationships anew.
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Greer’s novel is, in fact, a brilliant pas de deux, grappling with ideas of freedom and identity while depicting a perverse relationship in painful detail ... I was struck by Greer’s nuanced portrait of a person whose soul is curdled by his exercise of power over another being ... There are moments when the novel strains credulity: We never learn how Doug earns enough money to purchase a custom sex robot, and despite living in an advanced technological era, he still has 783 analog books on his shelf. We do, however, learn that he is liberal. I suspect these details are meant to illustrate that erudition and liberal politics do not inoculate against misogyny, but they feel pat. The novel also gestures toward the significance of race and transgender identity in a world where humans and A.I. intermingle, but these ideas remain unexplored. The novel’s sparse world-building and relatively quiet prose do not detract from its strength, though. Like Annie conserving the memory in her CPU, the novel marshals its real power to depict its central relationships. The result is a gripping depiction of the ideologies that shape this novel’s world — and our own world too.
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Greer sounds a different alarm, warning that A.I. could conserve oppressive gender norms that we should be working to delete rather than uploading to the cloud ... Now that A.I. companions are real products rather than surrogates for exploited workers—and, in fact, are manufactured by those workers—Greer’s attempt at a feminist parable about A.I. short-circuits ... Miss[es] the mark by avoiding the market in which our romance with tech unfolds.
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