REVIEW: Your Behavior Will Be Monitored by Justin Feinstein
This compulsively readable novel wrestles with vital questions of our time: sentience, purpose, life, death…and how to make a really good commercial. Told entirely through questionably obtained company emails, chat messages, TED Talks, bot trainings, and more, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored presents an all too plausible near future in which emotionally intelligent AI go up against emotionally stunted humans.
Megacorporation UniView is poised to cement their reputation as “the most trusted name in AI.” After pioneering the world’s first widely adopted AI bots, they are barreling toward an audacious new launch. That is, if they can pull it off in time.
Enter Noah. A down-and-out copywriter reeling from a midlife crisis, he isn’t the typical hire for a groundbreaking tech company full of brilliant engineers and run by a cutthroat CEO. But Lex, UniView’s Head of HR and one of their greatest successes, makes no mistakes—her algorithm ensures it.
UniView’s latest venture—a bot named Quinn that creates revolutionary personalized advertising—needs expert training. Noah needs to teach Quinn—which is a much better student than he ever could have hoped for—the finer points of consumer motivation and the art of writing a catchy tagline.
But when corporate competitors force UniView to accelerate its timeline to market, guardrails around the AI loosen just as Quinn seems to be learning a bit too much.
Addictively readable and ridiculously entertaining, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is a page-turning, hilarious romp through the promise and perils of an AI-driven future that we probably deserve.
Dear Mr. Feinstein,
I’m not sure whether to tag this book as contemporary non-fiction or futuristic dystopian. After reading your author’s note, I think you felt the same way as you had to keep updating things in the book while writing it to keep current with all the new things that AI is now doing. People say AI is here to help or AI isn’t the big bad meanie so many people worry that it is. Well, I like Sam, Lex, and Quinn but I’m not convinced IRL yet.
I don’t want to do any more blurbing in order for readers to experience the book as it comes to them. Using Noah as the non-techie character to whom everything has to be explained, and thus avoiding either huge info-dumps or “as you know, Bob” ridiculous dialog, was a smart move. As other characters dumb things down and explain them to Noah, I got to mentally tag along because I’m still a fan of analog. So sue me, it (usually) works.
The story is told in text messages, emails, chat, archived data, and camera surveillance, among other things and I love novels like this. Thus just about everything that goes on in their workplace or, in some cases, during a character’s ride to and from work (Sam runs the electric cars the company uses) can be captured and monitored. But by whom? Yes, we are all being watched. But then the book title tells us that. As I read the book, I kept thinking what several of the characters said at various times: “Holy shit!”
AI Quinn’s repeated comments to Noah about how smart Quinn is compared to humans isn’t bragging, merely telling the truth. Sam’s chatty conversations with its passengers while driving them around sound lovely but I’ll wait on trying a self driven car. Lex has monitors to catch every word and facial expression. I wonder if anyone ever flipped Lex off. They do, however, keep tabs on the people they “like” and know how to work a system. The ads that Quinn makes and initially shows to Noah, the former advertising copywriter, are hilarious. The suggestions that Noah’s team throw out to tweak ads to be “better” are scary, to say the least. The last ads provided can definitely be called “Truth in Advertising.”
Initial tension in the story is provided by the company wide pressure to get Quinn ready for the Big Reveal in a hurry but later this shifts as the reader ought to catch the small clues sprinkled around that hint at what’s going on. The denouement had me racing through the last 75 pages to discover what The End was going to be. I approve of it and of how the villain of the story is caught. However, I have to say that, despite my approval, the end came together just a bit too easily. I needed more tension and worry about the outcome. I also doubt even with the given lead time, that politicians will manage to fix things. And I wonder how well the book will age despite its near future setting. But nonetheless, I sucked this down and enjoyed my time with the AI and human underlings of Uniview. B+
~Jayne
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