A Working Theory of Love

A Working Theory of Love (2012) by Scott Hutchins. This is a surprisingly disappointing book that has interesting ideas behind it and takes place in a beautiful setting, but just doesn't deliver. Neill Bassett, the protagonist, is a man with a business degree who is recruited to help develop a computer that will pass the Turing test -- i.e., that will simulate human conversation so convincingly as to be taken for a person. Much of the book is taken up by "conversations" between Bassett and the artificial intelligence that he is training; the rest of the book is made up of Bassett's wanderings in the world of romance, where he falls in love with a girl named Rachel. The setting is the San Francisco Bay Area, certainly one of the  most beautiful settings in the United States. But it all failed to come together for me. None of the relationships seemed to develop in a natural or believable fashion, and there were strange leaps in meaning that I could make no sense of. This doesn't, of course, mean that this was a bad book -- just that I didn't "get it." Grade: B-