Q&A with Cate Holahan

 

 

 

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.