Book Review: 2040

Reviewed by Nick Rees Gardner

A laugh-out-loud comedy of errors, 2040: A Silicon Valley Satire parodies politics and lampoons our reliance on tech with intelligence and wit.

When Ethan Burnswagger and Arvind Subramanian began their startup, KumbAI, they didn’t foresee the conflict it would create between each other, their friends, or the entire United States. 

While their first AI invention, PresiBot, dips in the presidential election polls against the ersatz-Native American, Raging Bull, the two test what drastic measures they will take in order to win the election and make KumbAI a household name. 

Against a dystopian Silicon Valley backdrop, Pedro Domingos’s 2040 whips its protagonists through racially segregated ghettos, subterranean computer servers, and rooftop fundraisers with the trillionaires that run the world in a farce that is as frighteningly close as it is bizarrely funny.

Professor of Story Science at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, Dr. Angus Fletcher, calls satire, “mental novocaine,” in that it “reduces the felt intensity of our emotional hurts.” Reading a work of satire can reduce anxiety by allowing the reader to mock their own position in a place where they are unsatisfied. 

Pedro Domingos exaggerates our current issues to the point that the reader can’t ignore the ridiculousness of it all. Take, for example, the Republican PresiBot, an AI fed to the brink with every political speech, book, or memo, who resorts to non-answers and misdirects in debates rather than answering important political questions. Or, the careless group of trillionaires who share a rooftop dinner that ends in fisticuffs over their individual carbon footprints. Much of Domingos’s world revolves around petty squabbles in the wealthy world while unrest and squalor rules the streets three hundred stories below. No political or social issue is off limits to Domingos, for better or worse. 

The difficulty behind any satire is to show the ridiculousness behind a certain action or stance without being heavy-handed, a task which, for the most part, Pedro Domingos handles aptly. But depending on the reader and their beliefs, issues of race and of indigeneity and colonization are harped on rather thickly. For example, when Ethan, a white man, makes an offhand remark about the paucity of diversity in his field, he is arrested for not being PC; a farcical joke that rides the line between berating political correctness and a lack of respect for the conditions and histories of those not in his position. Similarly, Raging Bull, the non-native imposter who claims his ties to the Lakota and wields a tomahawk and feather headdress, seeks presidency so that he can rid the United States of all non-native people, stating “‘We’ll kill them all.’” Most, if not all of these statements can be written off as overdramatization, but their flippancy could be a turn-off for certain readers.  

However, satire and exaggeration and wild frivolity are not the only driving forces of 2040. While the novel follows a traditional overreacher plot, side plots, such as Ethan’s journey into the “Black Sector,” and his subsequent escape from the “Guards” after his unpolitically correct comment, add an intensity and tension that speeds the book along. A love triangle emerges and wreaks havoc and when a band of underground homeless people dressed as robots insert themselves into the plot, the conflict is amped up to life-or-death, making the book impossible to quit.

With such a fast-paced farce, there is no need for lyrical prose. Long stretches of witty back-and-forths take on much of the expositional work and the worldbuilding is subtle, but effective. Action drives 2040, and it drives it fast. Pedro Domingos steers the reader to the edge of reason, maybe pushes them over it, and reels them back in quickly with the sobering reminder that the world of 2040 is not so far away from our own. As a satire, 2040 is a sobering reminder packed inside a laughter machine, both thought-provoking and relieving as the reader chuckles off the weight of their worries.  

Thank you for reading Nick Rees Gardner’s book review of 2040 by Pedro Domingos! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

The post Book Review: 2040 appeared first on Independent Book Review.