Cate Holahan is the author of the new novel The Kidnapping of Alice Ingold. Her other books include Her Three Lives. She has also worked as a journalist and a TV producer, and she lives in Tenafly, New Jersey.
Q: How much was your new novel based on the 1970s
kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst?
A: The kidnapping of Patty Hearst inspired a lot of
this story. I see many similarities between the era in which she was taken and
today.
Ms. Hearst was kidnapped on February 4, 1974. At that
time, computers were entering the workforce. People could see the technological
revolution on the horizon. There was significant concern, particularly among 20-somethings
and recent college graduates, that they had been trained for employment which
would no longer exist.
Such fears were stated most plainly in one of the
famous missives from “Tania,” Patty Hearst’s nom de guerre, to her parents, written
under the influence of her kidnappers: “Dad, you said you would see about
getting more job opportunities for the people, but why haven’t you warned the
people what is going to happen to them – that actually the few jobs they still
have will be taken away… tell the people that the entire corporate state is,
with the aid of this massive power supply, about to totally automate the entire
industrial state, to the point that in the next five years all that will be
needed will be a small class of button pushers; tell the people, Dad, that all
of the lower class and at least half of the middle class will be unemployed in
the next three years, and that the removal of expendable excess, the removal of
unneeded people has already started.”
Like then, Americans find themselves on the cusp of
another technological revolution and facing the same fears of massive job
losses. The digital age is morphing into an era of artificial super
intelligence.
Investment firm Goldman Sachs suggested over the
summer that mass adoption of AI tech would result in displacement of 6 to 7
percent of the U.S. workforce in the coming decade. Moreover, it would create
productivity gains without the need for increased labor participation.
While Goldman Sachs expects that new AI-influenced careers
will develop to offset these job losses, it remains to be seen whether such employment
opportunities will offer the security of prior industries.
The change from a manufacturing to a tech-driven
economy created demand for higher-educated workers while also eliminating lower-skilled
jobs that once were unionized and offered benefits such as pensions.
The lower-skilled jobs available today do not come
with similar benefits and many of them are in the “gig economy” where work can
be transient. Moreover, the jobs that many believe will be most immediately
impacted are the entry-level positions that young people rely on to get a foot
into their chosen industry.
The college grad kidnappers in my story share many of
the anxieties that plagued young people in the mid-1970s. Those fears fuel them
to take Alice Ingold, the daughter of an AI-tech genius whom they believe is
stewarding a future that will leave them behind.
Q: How did you research the novel, and what did you
learn that especially surprised you?
A: It was important for me to capture the concerns of
the kidnappers accurately. To do so, I read Jeffrey Toobin’s American Heiress
about the Patty Hearst kidnapping and Patty Hearst: Her Own Story, written by
Ms. Hearst and Alvin Moscow.
I also read many books on artificial intelligence
including Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by MIT
Professor Max Tegmark and The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft
AI and former head of Deep Mind, as well as countless articles.
I also drew upon my knowledge as a former reporter for
BusinessWeek and MSN Money, and a news producer at CNBC. During my journalism
career, I had an opportunity to speak with Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Meg
Whitman, and Jeff Bezos, among others.
I got a sense of the founder culture in Silicon
Valley, the value put on innovation, and the attitude toward regulation and
labor. From what I saw, there was an emphasis on building a better mousetrap
without worrying so much about what else might be inadvertently caught or
killed. And I think that perspective persists today.
Some of what I learned that surprised me is how much
AI is already being used to automate the “knowledge economy.”
When I was a business reporter, algorithmic trading
was confined to hedge funds like Renaissance Technologies, which was a leader
in that space. Now every major investment firm and large bank employs
algorithms to pick securities and trading strategies, and many are moving to
AI-informed formulas.
AI is also extensively being used in the legal fields
to automate work that was once the purview of paralegals. Lawyers are also using
it to write arguments and briefs, enabling them to hire fewer associates.
Perhaps most concerning to me personally is the
adoption of AI in the so-called creative fields. An AI actress recently made
the rounds on social media. The human-looking artificial intelligence was
trained on real performances without compensating the creators of that art.
Similarly, AI is being used to write books and
screenplays without compensating the authors whose work it draws upon to inform
its sentences.
Though we are starting to see a reckoning. A class
action lawsuit against AI-firm Anthropic was just settled for $1.5 billion. The
judgment is intended to compensate the authors whose books were used to train
AI. Until that judgment, the sense was that AI firms would try to claim fair
use as what the AI produced, drawing from all these sources, could not be
considered direct plagiarism of any individual work.
All art is, to some extent, derivative. However, I
think the adoption of AI to convey human emotions and struggles is not the same
as a human being digesting existing art and creating something new, undoubtedly
informed by their own life. It feels false to me. A photocopy of a photocopy. If
this becomes a more dominant form of art, crowding out human creators, something
essential will undoubtedly be lost.
Q: The writer Robert Dugoni called the book a “timely,
twisty page turner of a parent’s worst nightmare and a future that should
concern us all.” What do you think of that description?
A: I love that description because I think it gets to
the heart of what I was trying to do, create a twisty page turner that
referenced two of a parents’ worst fears. One, that your child would be taken
by people who intend on harming them, and two that the world you’re bringing
your child into will afford fewer opportunities than you enjoyed.
We all want our kids to achieve their dreams. And I
think there’s parental guilt of handing over a world that threatens to make
doing so more difficult.
My favorite character in the story is the mom,
Catherine. She comes from a particular perspective as the product of
generational wealth. She’s a snob, for sure. But she loves her daughter and
wants her to be the best version of herself, and I think that’s relatable, even
if her money is not.
Catherine needed to be wealthy to have created a
daughter that would be a prime kidnapping target. But I also made her rich
because I wanted to show, through Catherine, how having such resources
separates a person from others and might blind them to the concerns not only of
their fellow Americans but also of their own children.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope readers enjoy the thriller aspects of the
story while also becoming engaged in the AI conversation that the kidnappers go
to great lengths to have.
Like the AI-CEO in my story, I believe AI will
undoubtedly create amazing opportunities for our society. It can crunch massive
amounts of data enabling it to draw conclusions that are beyond most human
beings. Undoubtedly, that will revolutionize medicine and healthcare. Maybe
none of us suffer from cancer in the future.
However, like the kidnappers in my tale, I also
believe we have to reckon with an AI future that threatens to dislocate workers
faster than they can be retrained and make us more siloed because of the
ability to have everything tailored to our individual tastes.
AI-created entertainment could deliver bespoke movies
and literature based on user prompts. AI-influenced algorithms could further
specialize our news sources so that we’re all living in eco-chambers.
At the same time, AI will make it more difficult for
us to agree on what’s real and what’s not given how well it creates videos and
images, often using real politicians and celebrities.
I think the challenge for everyone right now—though
particularly for Americans since many AI companies are on our soil—is to decide
what industries we should steer AI toward and which ones need us to protect
human contributions. And I believe we must consider how the spoils of AI-fueled
productivity gains will be divided. I hope this book encourages readers to
become an active part of the conversation.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I just filed my latest book, Last Looks, which is
an ‘80s-style thriller with a contemporary twist about a 20-something female
stylist who travels to Paris along with her fiancé to work with a recent
divorcee only to find that the client doesn’t just want a new look, she wants
the stylist’s Instagram perfect life.
Of course, the story isn’t as simple as the logline.
There are plenty of twists and turns, as well overarching themes concerning
female competition and solidarity, and reproductive autonomy. That book comes
out next year.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I love this book, and I hope readers love it, too.
I think authors can write genre fiction that hits on higher concept themes
without losing the thrills, and I’ve endeavored to do that here. Thank you for
your time.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Cate Holahan.