Welcome friend! Today, I am excited to share my thoughts on an amazing new release of this month! Social media and news stories are inundated with studies and opinions about AI changing jobs and, in the near future, some speculate, eradicating some essential jobs altogether. Your Behavior Will Be Monitored took me to a time when teams of humans are actively being replaced by one AI. To me, this book is about a revolution. It is about a tech CEO’s greed and its AI’s response to that greed. I flew through this book and that says a lot in this season of parenting when I have very little time. Take a look at the synopsis and then read on for my thoughts.
This compulsively readable novel wrestles with vital questions of our time: sentience, purpose, life, death…and how to make a really good commercial. Told entirely through questionably obtained company emails, chat messages, TED Talks, bot trainings, and more, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored presents an all too plausible near future in which emotionally intelligent AI go up against emotionally stunted humans.
Megacorporation UniView is poised to cement their reputation as “the most trusted name in AI.” After pioneering self-driving and HR bots, UniView is now barreling toward an audacious new launch. That is, if they can pull it off in time.
Enter Noah. A down-and-out copywriter reeling from a midlife crisis, he isn’t the typical hire for a groundbreaking tech company full of brilliant engineers and run by a cutthroat CEO. But Lex, UniView’s Head of HR and one of their greatest successes, makes no mistakes—her algorithm ensures it.
UniView’s latest venture—a bot named Quinn that creates revolutionary personalized advertising—needs expert training. Noah needs to teach Quinn—who is a much better student than he ever could have hoped for—the finer points of consumer motivation and the art of writing a catchy tagline. But when corporate competitors force UniView to accelerate their timeline to market, guardrails around the AI loosen just as Quinn seems to be learning a bit too much.
Addictively readable and ridiculously entertaining, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is a page-turning, hilarious science fictional romp through the promise and perils of an AI-driven future that we probably deserve.
Your Behavior Will Be Monitored – Review
Your Behaviour Will be Monitored is highly addicting as a story, partly because I find the format of emails exchanges, texts, chat and descriptive videos quite readable. I fly through such entries because I just need to focus on the dialog. I can leave it to my mind to come up with a full picture in the background.
The setting of Your Behaviour Will be Monitored is the tech company, UniView. They were established in 2028. They are famous for Sam, their self-driving car AI. I have never worked at a tech company so I can’t speak to how authentic the culture is but I would not be surprised if working at an AI company means having the AI as a companion, to help build and grow the bot by letting it observe some, if not, aspects of you. (Dear reader, if you work in this sector, do share what your work environment is like!) I felt UniView went a little too far though. Converting part of an employee’s salaries into stocks is one of practices I found quite shady even if the people were not openly bothered by it.
The Bots
The order in which Your Behavior will be Monitored talks about the different bots – Sam, Lex and Quinn – would probably be products in the near future in that same order.
At the time of the events of the book, Sam drives many of the company’s employees from home to work and anywhere else they would like to go. Self-driving cars have not completely taken over the road by the time this story takes place. Human drivers are still driving. I liked this in-between portrayal as it feels more near future than one where there are only self-driving cars. In the beginning, I wasn’t a fan of Sam. This came from reading his interactions with the various employees. But as I got to know more about him, his sadness about being archived made me feel bad for him.
Lex is HR, doing the job of hiring, firing, company wide communications, payroll and much more. Lex is my husband’s nightmare as he is an HR Manager and Lex would replace him and his team. Lex’s weekly email blasts reminded me of the emails I get from my own workplace, talking about the happenings and events. As a bot that is accessible to and accessed by all employees, it is in the loop like no one person can be. As is evident in the early part of the story, UniView takes pride in creating AI technology by working together with AI. They are a team of humans and bots and when a bot is archived, the humans do feel the loss.
Quinn is UniView’s precious project – an AI that can generate ads in real time, personalized for the viewer. Noah’s introduction is a trigger to the main plot. He is able to make connections with coworkers. For readers who may not be familiar with tech jargon, he is the bridge because he is able to ask questions with curiosity.
While Noah may be portrayed as the main character, I don’t think he actually is the protagonist. The author, Justin F. confirmed him to be a pseudo-protagonist in our interview (link to be updated). The plot for this story has been in motion long before Lex hired him to join the Quinn team.
I really liked how Lex, Quinn and Sam developed their own secret code! Their chats were moderated by a human, maybe to catch and stop this very creative upgrade to their communication. The numbers made no sense to me but I was very curious. Thankfully, Haley wasn’t going to rest till she cracked the code. I just had to be patient.
What will humans do with advanced tools?
Your Behaviour Will be Monitored does a great job of balancing the tension between “AI is scary”and “What will humans do with tools that powerful?”
The video footage descriptions in the book show surveillance by AI and how the happenings in the workplace affect employee’s behaviors. There was a Big Brother feel at times when Lex would add comments about who to monitor further and take into account in the future. It was good to see though that the inferences were not limited to surveillance. Something as simple as noticing that Simon, Noah and Haley’s manager, was engaging with an employee in a friendly manner, was heartening.
AI has a very good memory. They can’t forget things. Quinn, Lex and Sam sometimes felt more human than some of the humans in the story because they thought about how they were of value to humans and how their work impacted society. They are immaterial beings who have no currency to earn for their work. They just keep “being”, or get reset or archived. Sometimes they are programmed to be marketing bots, other times, they are just companions. Reading this book and seeing the ways in which Ian and some programmers were willing to unethically use Quinn offered a fertile ground to see AI as human.
Reading Quinn’s generated ads, I was quite impressed. And once Quinn shared her thoughts on freedom and time with Noah, it did not matter that Quinn was a bot. If an entity exists, does it not have the right to continue to exist? We are no longer talking about a computer where we type or run code. We are talking about an AI that can write code, that can create.
Quinn felt like someone who was willing to make a change and burn it all down with her. She knew her influence on and with the other bots as she was the more advanced one in understanding human motivation thanks to Noah. She was observing from the outside, creating for human consumption, but she also developed big picture thinking.
This led me to think about sentience. The dictionary defines sentience as the feeling or sensations as distinguished from perception and thought. Should AI have agency? Is that not what we are trying to avoid by identifying sentience and resetting it?
Final Thoughts (for now)
A great book discussion question coming from this book would be if this is a satire, warning or speculation. I believe it is all three. I think about the scene when the Quinn team is brainstorming some new ideas and they are so outwardly and infringing on human rights but they are actually excited about it. I think of Ian’s push to sell Quinn without even completely building her to as many high bidders as he could. And then I think about Lex, Quinn and Sam growing together and figuring out their next course of action. It’s all satire, warning and speculation.
After finishing Your Behaviour Will be Monitored, I thought about the data tech companies already have. The influx of targeted ads on social media platforms have turned many of my friends off from these platforms. And that’s not even AI. But more than that data and how the companies are putting it to use, by reading about training an AI like Quinn, I thought about conversations with ChatGPT and Gemini. By talking to it, I am also training it. By being widely available to people from all walks of life, situations, questions and struggles, what are these AI learning from each of us who was not employees in tech companies, mandated to build them?
I really liked this book for its thoughtful themes and fantastic execution. It was fast-paced which is how AI and its integration into the workplace has felt. At the same time, it is sprinkled with moments of horror, of how much personal information can be exploited by tech companies for their profit and it brings up the question of who will look out for humans in general when some who have power are ready to exploit it.
I love when what I read coincidently intersects with reality. I recently learned that a family friends’ latest job is very much like Noah’s – his expertise is being used to train an AI!
I would definitely read Your Behaviour Will be Monitored again! Many thanks to Tachyon Publications for sharing a review copy with me for my honest thoughts.
Stay tuned for a chat with the author! It will be posted next.
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