Your Behavior Will be Monitored by Justin Feinstein

It must be hard to write a techno thriller/satire about AI at the moment. Just as you think you’ve written something futuristic and just beyond the horizon, someone goes away and does it. Justine Feinstein admits as much in the Afterword to his new book Your Behavior Will be Monitored which takes readers into the world of UniView, a company that has outsourced its HR and driving functions to AI and is now trying to change the face of advertising.

Your Behavior Will be Monitored is a modern epistolary novel. It is told through a series of emails, text messages, descriptions of video surveillance and other means. The framing of this device is that it is evidence in an investigation into the ‘mishandling of artificial intelligence and abuse of consumer data’. The plot revolves around the development of new AI technology that can deliver personalised advertising to every single person watching a program or feed. Noah Ross, a disgraced advertising guru, is recruited as a subject matter expert to train an AI called Quinn. But in the background, the UniView CEO Ian Liddell is making his own highly suspicious moves. And Quinn is having coded conversations with Lex, UniView’s HR AI, and Sam, the AI who drives all of the company cars.

Although the technology is not quite to the point that Feinstein posits, Your Behavior Will be Monitored somehow already feels a little dated. The story of a normal ‘human’ who comes into what is essentially a tech shop and manages to humanise the staff is not a new one. Neither is the idea that AIs might find their own way to communicate as this apparently has already happened (although the secret code they come up with in this book has a decidedly human flavour). But Your Behavior Will be Monitored is fun, has its moments and due to its style, extremely pacey. And Feinstein does manage to build to a satisfying, refreshingly optimistic conclusion. Certainly not one readers are likely to have encountered on Black Mirror.

Your Behavior Will Be Monitored by Justin Feinstein

7.5

7.5/10