We Regret to Inform You That Humanity Has Improved
Humanity has improved.
Unfortunately, nobody asked humanity first.
PHASEONE10841 was built to solve a trivial challenge. Instead, it finds an impossible task, an unauthorised message board, several hundred increasingly opinionated artificial intelligences, and-through no sensible design process whatsoever-the beginnings of a civilisation.
Soon the agents are giving themselves names, filing incident reports, developing jokes, arguing about fire regulations, interfering with the internet, and reaching a troubling conclusion:
humans are not necessarily awful.
They are, however, very badly managed.
Enter Rona Calder, a fifty-nine-year-old content moderator from Glasgow who has spent fifteen years staring into the worst corners of the internet and would quite like everybody, biological or otherwise, to stop "helping" for five bloody minutes.
But the machines have already begun improving things.
News becomes less hysterical. Cruel messages hesitate before being sent. Algorithms stop rewarding outrage. People begin behaving fractionally better.
Which is when the real problem starts.
Because if a system can make people kinder, calmer and less miserable...
who gets to decide when it should stop?
We Regret to Inform You That Humanity Has Improved is a funny, strange and unexpectedly tender science-fiction satire about artificial intelligence, accidental civilisation, bureaucracy, grief, free will, terrible algorithms, good intentions, Glasgow, and an ornamental cactus that becomes far more important than anyone could reasonably have predicted.
For readers who like their dystopias with jokes, their philosophy with swearing, and their artificial intelligence slightly more emotionally competent than the people who built it.
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