The robots are coming. Hide the WD-40. Lock up your nine-volt batteries. Build a booby trap out of giant magnets; dig a moat as deep as a grave. “Ever since a study by the University of Oxford predicted that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence over the next fifteen to twenty years, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the future of work,” Andrés Oppenheimer writes, in “The Robots Are Coming: The Future of Jobs in the Age of Automation” (Vintage). No one is safe. Chapter 4: “They’re Coming for Bankers!” Chapter 5: “They’re Coming for Lawyers!” They’re attacking hospitals: “They’re Coming for Doctors!” They’re headed to Hollywood: “They’re Coming for Entertainers!” I gather they have not yet come for the manufacturers of exclamation points.
The old robots were blue-collar workers, burly and clunky, the machines that rusted the Rust Belt. But, according to the economist Richard Baldwin, in “The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work” (Oxford), the new ones are “white-collar robots,” knowledge workers and quinoa-and-oat-milk globalists, the machines that will bankrupt Brooklyn. Mainly, they’re algorithms. Except when they’re immigrants. Baldwin calls that kind “remote intelligence,” or R.I.: they’re not exactly robots but, somehow, they fall into the same category. They’re people from other countries who can steal your job without ever really crossing the border: they just hop over, by way of the Internet and apps like Upwork, undocumented, invisible, ethereal. Between artificial intelligence and remote intelligence, Baldwin warns, “this international talent tidal wave is coming straight for the good, stable jobs that have been the foundation of middle-class prosperity in the US and Europe, and other high-wage economies.” Change your Wi-Fi password. Clear your browser history. Ask H.R. about early retirement. The globots are coming.
Here’s where it gets messy: the novel’s clout comes to rest on how Box manages his emotions once he arrives in Evelyn’s life, as Trotter’s pastiche edges into more painful exploration of male violence and its aftermath. You see what he’s up to – questioning noir motifs rather than just rehearsing them – but can’t help feeling the novel gets into waters that are too deep and too murky for the abrupt resolution to be persuasive. Still, for three-quarters of the novel, Muscle is some high-wire act, channelling Samuel Beckett as well as Dashiell Hammett, with a dash of quantum mechanics to boot.
The White Book is a novel that's difficult to describe, but easy to love. It's a delicate book, hard to know, impossible to pin down, but it's filled with some of Han's best writing to date. And it's also one of the smartest reflections on what it means to remember those we've lost.
The risk of such wide-ranging subject matter is that it ends up skittering across the surface. Here, however, Morrison’s words possess a contemporary resonance, delivering unwavering truths with an intelligent rage that is almost equal to her hope.
David Thomson has spent his life in the dark. Cocooned in the gloom of cinemas, he is licensed to dream with his eyes open. Now, in his late 70s, he is searching for enlightenment, blinking a little as he faces the glare of the reality outside.
Thomson’s criticism – for me the most ingenious and imaginative writing about film – has always been supplemented by cheeky fantasy. In his biographies of Orson Welles and Warren Beatty he overleaps known facts, treating his subjects as characters in a wishful novel of his own; in Suspects (1985) he invents prequels and afterlives for the fatal women and doomed men of film noir. Sleeping With Strangers, however, is the product of a wrenching reappraisal of this daydreaming and the art that encourages it. As the title suggests, films invite us to fall in love with their stars, whom we use as virtual prostitutes. But does this mean that male viewers like Thomson have been trained as voyeurs and potential predators? Could Harvey Weinstein, who produced so many fine films while allegedly ravaging the lives of so many young women, be the bloated, toad-like personification of the art?