Becky's Great Book Reviews The Family Experiment by John Marrs

Everyone tries to imagine a future with AI taking more and more of a role in our society. The Family Experiment by John Marrs is a chilling and excellent take on one scenario.

A social experiment is taking place in the form of a reality show. Eleven people, five couples and a single parent, are competing to raise an AI child in a virtual reality contest. These are fully interactive "children" who come to adulthood in nine months. The audience streaming the show vote on parental skills by using red heart or black heart emojis. Each family gets $250,000. Losers lose the money, and winners can either keep the 250,000 along with the fake child OR pull the plug on their child and get the money to start a real-world family of their own.

There are some who are vocally opposed to this process and want to shut it down. Others raise questions of rights like maternity leave or what constitutes abuse and if the virtual parents should be held accountable. Alternating chapters show the viewers' texted responses, being predictably all over the map in extremity.

Marrs takes us through each contestant in the show and paints a picture of what brought them to this point: from infertility to purely financial gains, each family has their own agenda and backstory. What we eventually learn about the production company, Awakening Entertainment, is that they have gone to extraordinary and evil measures to get their AI product out there and move ahead of their rivals. The contestant that eventually exposes the world to what this company is doing in the name of advancing technology brings the novel to an incredible climax.

This thrilling take on what could be in our future (hopefully not) makes for great reading and raises all kinds of questions about the tenability of Artificial Intelligence. I give The Family Experiment by John Marrs four stars out of five.