Prey

In the morning, Jack thinks Julia’s features look more defined. He can see her cheekbones in her usually plump face. They argue about him taking too much control of the kids when she’s home. Julia says he never helps her and that he sabotages her. He thinks about the “alienation of affection” (64) theory that is in vogue, in which mothers turn children against their fathers, who then take the fathers to court. The judges typically rule in the mother’s favor and the father is left without his children, or so the theory goes.

Julia calls and apologizes, which is consistent with her recent pattern. After their call, Jack meets with Annie Gerard, a headhunter. She has two jobs for him to consider, but both would require a move, which doesn’t interest him. Jack thinks about how his field has evolved: The goal of tech is now the creation of artificial life, not artificial intelligence. Silicon Valley is obsessed with creating programs that mimic agency, not merely intelligence. This aligns with his work in distributed processing, in which the solving of complex tasks is spread across many miniature processors. Under observation, “[t]he behavior of the system emerged, the result of hundreds of small interactions occurring at a lower level” (68).