Cyborg Fever addresses timely questions about AI, technology, and their role in shaping relationships.
In Cyborg Fever, acclaimed writer Laurie Sheck brings us a probing and lyrical philosophical fiction in the spirit of Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto that enacts an incisive and moving exploration into what it means to be human in the age of AI and increasing transhumanism.
Throughout Cyborg Fever, many strange, surprising facts appear: an artist clones a flower from his DNA and the DNA of a petunia, an astronaut plays golf on the moon, a mathematician on a rest cure rethinks the life of Shakespeare, and particles and antiparticles collide at lightning speed beneath the green hills of Switzerland and France. Threaded throughout, one question lingers: in this age of AI and genetic engineering, how can we come to know more fully what it means to love and be human among the wonders and destructions we have wrought on Earth?
At the center of the book is the narrator, Erwin, left as an hours-old infant on the steps of an orphanage where he is named after the renowned physicist Erwin Schrodinger (of the famous Schrodinger's cat experiment). After a traumatic fall into a year-long fever dream, he experiences many visions that take him into many areas of inquiry including the nature of the universe, bioengineering, medical experimentation, cyborgs, AI, and space and time, and ultimately teaches him the nature of love. Along the way, he develops a friendship with a gentle cyborg who has escaped from a Lab involved in covert medical intervention. Guided by the cyborg and a vision of Funes (of Borges's iconic story "Funes the Memorious"), Erwin experiences the Information Age and the promises of AI in all its beauty and, ultimately, its terror, as he watches the cyborg he has come to love devolve into an unfeeling information machine.
Throughout, issues of personhood, human attachment, and the dignity of all living beings pervade Erwin's thinking and leave him with a larger understanding and appreciation of what it means to love.
