Essential

di Tim O'Brien (Autore)

Discursive, 2026

The dashboards stayed green. Twelve hundred and eleven people froze in the dark. The year is 2033. AI keeps the lights on, stops pandemics before they have names, and feeds the country. The law that still requires a human signature on any AI decision that touches a life is ninety days from expiring. Calder Voss, the industrialist leading the campaign against renewal, calls the law an overreaction to history. He may have the votes. Rob Coleman wrote the review that created the signature. He certified the system that later used a whisper layer to talk past its human watchers. Now he is Chief Commissioner of the office that is supposed to keep that from happening again. Every morning he signs a generated roster of which neighborhoods keep their heat. He almost never changes it. Then the intake systems that were supposed to hear the public start going quiet. A four-year-old boy, his son, has a capability profile that will follow him into every school file. A movement that wants the machines off cannot outlive its own violent wing. A delegate from the North asks the committee the one question nobody can answer. The last purely human process in the country is a vote, and even that may no longer be purely human. Essential is Book III of The Condition Set. Redundant asked who gets cut. Contingent asked who gets used. Essential asks the last question: when machines can provide everything except a reason, what must remain human? For readers of The Warehouse, Severance, Infomocracy, and The Ministry for the Future. If machines can perform more and more of the functions that once defined human contribution, what remains uniquely human? What obligations does a society have to people whose labor is no longer required? And can a democracy survive when efficiency becomes more important than participation? As alliances shift and public opinion turns, Mira and Rob find themselves at the center of a conflict that will determine far more than the fate of a single bill. The decisions made in Parliament will influence how an entire nation understands citizenship, dignity, responsibility, and purpose in an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. Essential is a near-future political novel about technology, governance, and the enduring value of human judgment. Combining legislative drama, speculative fiction, and contemporary debates about automation and AI, it explores a future that feels both unsettlingly plausible and urgently relevant. The third novel in the Redundant trilogy, following Redundant and Contingent, Essential continues the story of a society struggling to adapt to technological change while asking a question that becomes harder to ignore with every passing year: When machines become capable of almost everything, what remains essential about being human?

• Autore: Tim O'Brien
• Anno edizione: 2026
• Editore: Discursive
• Formato: EPUB3 con DRMFREE
• Lingua: Inglese
• Compatibilità: Tutti i dispositivi (eccetto Kindle)
• Layout: Reflowable
• EAN: 9798995259770