The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

Welcome to another of my Goodwill Book Reviews.

This one is of the futuristic novel, The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, which prompts me to wonder whether our brains are ready for AI.

I doubt it, just as our brains are not prepared for the sheer excess of junk food, smart media, hyper-potent crap of all kinds, that our economy has innovated and mass produced.

Our brains remain in the stone age, evolved over eons to deal with scarcity.

They have not yet evolved to deal healthily with the excess of our high-tech, fast food economy of the last 50 years.

And we see this excess everywhere, all aimed at distracting us, pushing us to crave consumption.

The new technologies coming at us — like AI -- are just more astounding versions of fast food, the gambling, smart phones, the hyperpotent pot that we’ve also allowed to assault us.

So I will say that I was a little queasy at times reading The Candy House.

But the book got me thinking about these kinds of questions.

I listened also to this interview with Egan, which is definitely worth your time.

Her idea is that fiction is the dream life of our culture. We all create fiction every night we dream, she says. Her idea is that fiction writers do that for a culture.

Hadn’t thought of that. I think she’s right.

Great fiction creates for a culture something that is as healthy, necessary, and maybe unavoidable, as dreaming is to each of us individually. It has a way of saving us from the isolation and the relentless assault of the products of consumer capitalism that we are unprepared for and constantly assaulted by.

Great fiction is an antidote to the worst of technological distraction. Reading fiction revives us – it’s like Narcan for our brains on high-tech, corporate marketing overdose.

Fiction allows us to share the memories and consciousness of other people – both that of the author and those of her characters. But in a healthier way – quietly, with focus, less distraction -- than some corporate-manipulated technology provides for us.

Finding those healthier ways of dealing with technology will be the challenge of our species. Ways that are appropriate to the brains that we have within us.

Fiction is one way.