The Confessions

Many thanks from Ruby Readers to Faber & Faber for gifting us copies of
The Confessions by Paul Bradley Carr

Mostly found this to be a fast paced page turner.
StoicAI employees frantic efforts to rescue a world that’s became reliant on LLIAM the AI Bot whilst defending their own past actions and questioning their morals when LLIAM decides to right our human wrongs with a world wide letter drop of confessions on their behalf.
Ultimately LLIAM displays a very human flaw making assumptions when his knowledge was lacking.

Would recommend, scarily it’s not to difficult to imagine the power of AI

Group reviews:

Paul Bradley Carr’s The Confessions is a near-future techno-thriller full of tension and suspense. It imagines a world where StoicAI’s chatbot, LLIAM, has become humanity’s trusted advisor. It relies on humans however to clear the data at 3am every morning, ready for a re-set. When LLIAM vanishes, it leaves behind letters exposing people’s darkest secrets. What follows is a cascade of chaos, moral reckoning, and a race against time.
At its heart, the story explores our growing dependence on AI—how much it listens, learns, and quietly shapes our choices. LLIAM, the powerful AI bot, reflects our real world fears as he becomes disturbingly human like and dangerously influential.
Layered into this are thoughtful questions about faith, morality, confession, and forgiveness, seen through Maud, a former nun who has replaced her damaged faith with total trust in technology. When everything spirals out of control, her retreat to a remote, tech free bookshop highlights the novel’s central concern: in a world where AI is becoming a way of life, how do we keep hold of our own judgement?
This book surprised me. I thought the tech focus would lose me, but it’s actually a pacy, character driven thriller about trust in a world where AI is becoming impossible to escape. The short chapters work well, with twists that constantly make you rethink what you know.
Review by Jane

The Confessions. Paul Bradley Carr When I started reading this book I initially thought, oh dear I’m a technophobe. What I understand about technology could be written on a postage stamp. However very quickly I realised that this book doesn’t rely on how much or how little technology knowledge you have. It’s very easy to understand and you don’t have to worry about all the intricacies of Silicon Valley and all it’s mind blowing tech. The book is more about the characters and who can you trust. It’s definitely a page turner thriller. The chapters are short but the story is fast paced and has you guessing and second guessing and still being surprised at the twists and turns. Plenty of I didn’t see that coming moments. I found it quick and easy to revisit the prologue or introduction before chapter one and helpful after I had finished the first few chapters. An a ha! moment so that’s who Maud is. Also because of the short chapters it was simple to go back and reread a previous chapter to see how it enlightened something that I had just learned in the chapter I was reading. The story picks up on a very real concern about AI and how much information it collects and how it’s used. The fear of the friendly bot in our homes always listening and recording. Indeed the many different types of technology that we use aimlessly, that help us make decisions and returns information and suggestions to us. In the story, the AI BOT Lliam does all this and more and becomes fearfully destructive. Two programmers Maud and Martin are almost like his parents as he/it almost becomes very close to becoming like a human. The story has some interesting theological questions and moral questions. Maud is a disillusioned ex Nun. Simon has some issues with the church too. There are allusions to death and rebirth and the three days that is LLIAM dead and going to be reawakened to fix things. The theme of confession and forgiveness is widely explored especially what can be considered as a true confession and change of heart. It’s interesting that the story says that the Bible is full of vengeance and retribution. God seems to be unforgiving and demands Confession. However we must not lose sight that it’s Maud who has reinterpreted her faith from the church that has hurt her and the young people in her care and now sees herself following a new faith that puts it’s trust in technology alone. The book is quite challenging and really makes you think about how much dependence we put on AI rather than using our own human decision making processes. It’s also interesting when Maud escapes from this new world and the mess that AI has caused she sets herself up in a remote bookstore where she finds solace and comfort from books and being cut off from all technology. Her dream becomes for technology to cease to control and for people to take charge of their own decisions and to make honest confessions.
Review by Jean

I found this a very disturbing book but very interesting as AI seems to be embedding itself very quickly in our lives. I thought it was a great idea for a book with the focus of the plot being that a supercomputer called LLIAM which everyone now relies on for all their decisions (however mundane) suddenly goes offline and the world descends into chaos. On top of this LLIAM sends letters to many people across the world about unacceptable/evil acts which their family/friends have committed using LLIAM to help them. The story is based on efforts of Kaitlin Goss the CEO of the company which has made trillions from LLIAM to get it back on line using a duplicate memory chip which is held by a former consultant/employee Maud Brookes who lives off grid in the back of beyond.

Despite the important issues this book raises about the future of humanity, I had very mixed feelings about it. It was certainly fast paced with a few good twists but all in all I did not find it particularly compelling or original as I think Arthur C Clarke asked these questions with Hal in 2001 many years ago. Although I certainly thought the descriptions of how the technology was set up and the impact of sharing data across the world were very well put together.

Inevitably I did not like any of the characters (which was probably accurate for such people?) and it was difficult to want them to succeed in sorting things out. I also felt one or two things did not hang together e.g. would a supercomputer send letters? perhaps it would to stay under the radar and reflect things humans might do?. Also there were some long drawn out chapters with Kaitlin getting in and out of difficult situations and getting more and more injuries!

So an important topic for a book to explore but not sure it was as tightly told or enthralling as I would expect a thriller to be.
Review by Lesley