Cloudthinker

Cloudthinker is a page-turning "dawn of AGI" novel complete with a globe-spanning action, an evil mega-corp, iconic bad guys, and a heroine with a name so good, she needed a novel: Boogie Wu.

But, what sets it apart is the density of ideas. Most of us get into Sci-Fi because we want to think, to be challenged by "what-ifs". Yet, many novels explore too little ground or do so too shallowly (Klara and Sun, anyone?). Cloudthinker flips so many of the AI tropes on their heads that the author could spend three novels pulling on all the revealed threads.

McGlinchey's training at the University of Toronto's AI nerd factory shows through, navigating fluidly through neuroanatomy, abstract math, and ML all the way into Searle's Chinese Room. The latter is the idea at the core of the book, and he uses it to flip the table on the "stochastic parrot" crowd. Rather than worrying about whether AI understands in a way that would satisfy a philosopher, he asks whether they feel in a way that would terrify an ethicist. He marries this question with Boogie's long overdue Zen training and her discoveries in Connection theory to

spin a yarn that takes you inside the emerging mind of the AI and back to the imperfect ones it sprang from.

Settings and situations are credibly built on his familiarity with life in High Tech, and what appear to have been a few too many trans-Pacific flights. For anyone who has lived the life, you can feel the air miles he logged before sitting down to write.

Cloudthinker lives in my favorite sci-fi neighborhood: our planet, our lifetimes, our physics. There are so many questions we need to get our heads around before they get answered in a lab and released to turn our lives upside down. Cloudthinker grabs a bunch and rubs them against our brains. Best of all, it does so at pace; this isn't an exercise in marrow-sucking, it's a romp. McGlinchey delivers a fantastic first effort, hopefully, the first of many.