Book Description
A playful and provocative exploration of queer single parenting and love, in conversation with an AI algorithm and a toddler
My Child, the Algorithm describes encounters between a single parent, a curious, verbal toddler, and a language-producing algorithm. Like a male seahorse, Hannah Silva carried a baby made from her partner’s egg. But when she gave birth, her partner left, and Hannah found herself navigating life alone with her child, surviving on United Kingdom universal credit, humor, and buckets of imagination.
As she navigates friendship, dating, and life as a queer parent in London, Hannah begins cowriting with an open-source language model, a precursor to ChatGPT, feeding the algorithm language and receiving language in return. Through her interactions with her toddler and the algorithm, expressions of humor, play, and insight begin to emerge. With the help and disruption of these unreliable narrators, Hannah deconstructs her story and constructs a new one, unraveling what she has been taught to want, finding alternative ways of thinking, loving, and parenting today.
Praise For This Book
"This is the perfect read for non-fiction readers who love to be challenged and inspired." —Ameema Saeed, SheDoesTheCity"A striking reflection on the intersection of queer single parenthood and AI . . . [T]he book is consistently surprising and far ranging in scope . . . [T]he writing is curious, intelligent, propulsive, and memorable. Silva’s text manages to be both immensely readable at first glance and rewarding to those who choose to read slowly, savoring and annotating . . . [T]he author’s inventiveness and emotional urgency make this book an intriguing reading experience. Silva is a playful theorist with an elastic intellect." —Kirkus Reviews
"Hannah Silva's My Child, the Algorithm, is one of the best books I read this year. Merging the cozy familiarity of child-rearing with the mysterious tension of AI (or is it the mysterious tension of child-rearing with the cozy familiarity of AI?), she has created a new genre of personal narrative, and a story whose grief, hope and curiosity takes on poetic, spiritual dimensions, even when exploring the most common chambers of the human heart." —Michelle Tea, author, Knocking Myself Up
