We live in an increasingly technological world, in which we come into contact with more sophisticated machines every day. We are now used to "dialogue" with smartphones and computers with a naturalness and ease that we once reserved only for our fellow men. One wonders how far the relationship between human beings and technological means will go. Above all: what will happen when the so-called artificial intelligence becomes so sophisticated as to relate on a par with human intelligence?
Liz Moore offers us some surprising answers to these questions in her latest novel, "The invisible world" (NNeditore, 2021, pp. 432, also e-book), a book that is presented on 17 September in Cagliari during the Marina Cafè Noir and the next day in Alghero at the Cyrano Library. These are two occasions to meet directly this young American writer who in this novel - as in the previous one "The skies of Philadelphia" (NNeditore, 2020) - demonstrates that she has mastered an elegant writing and that she is able to build exciting plots even when dealing with complex themes as they can. be those related to information technology and the most futuristic technology.
In the novel, in fact, we let ourselves be involved with unexpected naturalness in the story of Ada Sibelius, a twelve-year-old who has never met her mother and lives with her father David, a computer genius, in Boston in the 1980s. David is developing one of the first prototypes of artificial intelligence, Elixir, a program designed to replicate human language. For Ada, the father is everything and her childhood and early youth spent in a computer lab, amidst formulas and codes. Things suddenly change when David's mind begins to waver, to get lost in the maze of calculations so complex as to touch the impossible. At this point the girl is entrusted to a colleague of her father, mother of three children. She therefore finds herself in contact with a reality made up of human relationships, not all simple and pleasant, to which she is not used. At this point Ada will try to adapt to her new life while remaining faithful to that eccentric and elusive father who has been for her the center of life for a long time. And when David mysteriously disappears, the girl will begin to weave an ever closer relationship with the artificial intelligence created by the parent, an intelligence that year after year will prove capable of becoming autonomously more and more complex and sophisticated.
The relationship with the world of machines will become the only possible way for Ada to understand who her father really was and what truths about herself and her origins have been hidden from her. It will become an opportunity for her - and also for the reader willing to "accompany" her on her journey - to understand the infinite power of love, a feeling so strong that perhaps it cannot be exclusive only to living beings, but is capable of go beyond the boundaries between men and machines.