This is a new novel by Paul Carr where I have seen the first instance of AI as a main character. The book takes place in the near future, when AI is pervasive and interconnected. Called LLIAM, it is used universally by humans to make decisions large and small, and becomes an essential part of nearly everyone’s life. Then one day it goes dark, and bad things start happening. Before its demise, it sends out a series of postal letters that at first glance are confessions of things gone wrong: crimes committed and hidden from loved one’s view or past love affairs that happened. Fixing this massive outage are two schools of thought, one involving using more technology and one accepting the new fate of humankind without AI supercomputers. The characters who are behind the AI tech have to make some fast decisions, and their conflict drives the narrative forward, while the world continues to tumble into darkness. While some of the tech assumptions aren’t accurate, the future imagined by Carr is a very real one and a caution for those enamored with AI.