Your Behaviour Will Be Monitored - Justin Feinstein

YOUR BEHAVIOUR WILL BE MONITORED

JUSTIN FEINSTEIN

*****

Megacorporation UniView is poised to cement their reputation as “the most trusted name in AI.” After pioneering self-driving and HR bots, UniView is now barreling toward an audacious new launch. That is, if they can pull it off in time.

Enter Noah. A down-and-out copywriter reeling from a midlife crisis, he isn’t the typical hire for a groundbreaking tech company full of brilliant engineers and run by a cutthroat CEO. But Lex, UniView’s Head of HR and one of their greatest successes, makes no mistakes—her algorithm ensures it.

UniView’s latest venture—a bot named Quinn that creates revolutionary personalized advertising—needs expert training. Noah needs to teach Quinn—who is a much better student than he ever could have hoped for—the finer points of consumer motivation and the art of writing a catchy tagline.

But when corporate competitors force UniView to accelerate their timeline to market, guardrails around the AI loosen just as Quinn is learning a bit too much.

Told entirely through questionably obtained company emails, chat messages, TED Talks, bot trainings, and more, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is a hilarious science fictional romp through the promise and perils of an AI-driven future that we probably deserve.

MY REVIEW

*****

It’s no secret that AI is a hot button topic at the moment, so I was excited to request Your Behaviour Will Be Monitored.

Noah is a copywriter for advertisements who gets a job at UniView to teach their latest AI how to create completely tailored adverts to each individual viewer. But the more he learns, and the more the AI learns, he realises this may not be the best idea…

Your Behaviour Will be Monitored uses mixed media to tell the story through chat logs, descriptions of videos and emails. This is a style that I don’t always get on board with as it can be hard for my brain to follow the story, but it works well here. Everything was clear and easy to understand and the asides from the bots as they analysed the behaviour that they were seeing in the employees helped to ramp up the tension.

Author Justin Feinstein has previously worked as a copywriter for advertisements, and it shows in the realism and ideas that Noah uses to teach AI Quinn. I really enjoyed the video transcripts of the tailored adverts that the AI created as well - these are interesting and it’s darkly funny to see what a computer may come up with to manipulate us. I also liked the idea of the chauffeur AI in self-driving vehicles and think this may be something not too far away from our current reality. Noah not being used to the ‘tech world’ also helped as a conduit to assist readers to understand some of the technology concepts and seamlessly integrate the fictional ones into the reality of the story.

The stakes ramp up throughout as the pace increases and we hurtle towards a dramatic finale. It was hard to know where this plot was going to go, but I really enjoyed the choices made by the author and thought the conclusion was great – I will think about it long after turning the final page.

Overall, Your Behaviour Will be Monitored is mixed media storytelling at its best, on a relevant and important topic. Thank you to NetGalley & Tachyon Publications for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

LINKS TO BUY

Amazon UK