Books like All Through the Night

I came across this book by accident when I was researching the life of an amateur astronomer called George Denton Hirst and heard that his family, mainly his parents, are mentioned in this book.

Finding this book was an unexpected pleasure. Rachel Henning was an Englishwoman who first sailed to Australia in 1854 at the age of 28 to join her brother, who had arrived a year earlier. After a short return trip home, she settled in Australia permanently. In her letters to her sister back in England, she not only describes society life in Sydney, the main city, but mainly the difficult existence on her brother's various sheep stations. Rachel writes well and reading her fascinating depictions of the people and happenings around her, reminded me of reading a Jane Austen novel.

I’m fascinated by the ways AI and intimacy are becoming intertwined.

We already trust AI with our deepest thoughts, questions, and secrets. Increasingly, people are forming intimate relationships with this software that knows them so well. The more it learns about us, and the better it becomes at anticipating what we want, the more complicated our ideas about desire, consent, and control become.

Like my book, Annie Bot asks whether a choice can truly be yours if someone (or something) has been designed to shape it. If technology can influence or even manufacture desire, what does consent look like?