The Vestigial Heart

The Vestigial Heart / Carme Torras
trans. from the Catalan by Josephine Swarbrick
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018, c2007.
262 p.

Now this was an unusual read. The author is a professor of robotics in Barcelona, and writes her academic work in English and fiction in Catalan. This one is a bit of both, really -- fiction about the ethics of robots and AI. 

The book opens in a future a few hundred years from now. Human emotion is almost extinct; people seem to drift through experience, never really maturing, dependent on their personal robot assistants -- everyone has one.

Silvana is a researcher who reads old books to try to understand emotion; she's part of a group who is anti-tech. Leo is a robotics researcher working on a "creativity prosthesis" under the auspices of one of the biggest tech companies. Lu is a youngish woman who decides she wants to adopt a child (due to a shortage of children many adoptees are children cryogenically frozen in the past when cures for their diseases were unknown). And Celia is the 13 yr old from the 20th century who is unfrozen to become Lu's daughter -- full of memories and human emotion. 

These lives intertwine to reveal many philosophical issues about robotics, AI, their effects on users, and the responsibility of creators when developing these kinds of things -- the idea that humanity needs to be part of robotics is strongly emphasized.  In fact there is a reader's guide at the end which poses ethical questions for discussion, noting the relevant chapters. 

Despite this, it's a pretty good read as a novel as well. I enjoyed the academic tone and the characters. It reminded me a bit of The Forever Formula, a book I read in junior high about a cryogenically frozen teen awoken in a dystopian future -- slightly different ethical questions in that one but the same sense of examination of where tech might take us. 

In any case, the author of this one has a vested interest in robotics so the anti-tech group in her novel isn't going to come out well. Silvana's choices at the end of the book felt a bit sudden in one way, although they are partly driven by the emotions she's been trying to grasp. But if you like intellectual speculative fiction that makes no bones about being a study of ethics you might want to give this a try also. It's an intriguing concept and I found it interesting in a few different ways.