Artificial Wisdom: A Novel

by Thomas R. Weaver

To all those stricken by nature’s fury, And to the young souls inheriting our storm-tossed world: May hope always light your path.

“The responsibility lies with those who did the deed and those who prop them up, not the ones exposing it.”

Maybe once upon a time, America would have clearly led the pack, but it’d squandered that leadership over many decades as the country itself had become more polarized and elected more extreme leaders on both ends of the spectrum.

Life rn be like

Instead, he fired off messages expressing his disappointment and his certainty that they’d not let him down again.

Why does Tully express discontent and reprimand his competitors? And why do they apologize? Is there some agreement?

She cared nothing about anything right now.

I understand Livia is depressed but I don't connect with the feeling because there is no POV from her side or more of a backstory of their sibling relationship.

Reputations were slowly built and quickly destroyed.

before the real forests had died in the wildfires that had wiped the once great state off the American flag.

But the idea that she could walk like an invisible ghost around Tully’s apartment, with absolutely no way of anyone realizing, was intoxicating.

But why... Like does she like him or what

“A hundred years ago,” Flora recited, “computers were in their infancy, but the elites of the time knew their potential. They sold it as a way of freeing humanity, but it was about doing the opposite. They flooded Silicon Valley with money until a computer was in every pocket. Then they funded the invention of social media to track everyone, to know what they liked and believed. Then they corrupted those beliefs, played them back to people in their own echo chambers. And slowly, humanity became polarized. It was us and them, and neither side was able to even listen to the other without prejudgement.”

Sounds like life now...

“Then,” she continued, “they started to fake disasters. Some were real, like the wildfires, but they were human-made. Others …” She looked at Tully. “It’s amazing what you could do even back then with video on social or the news. Tsunamis, hurricanes, floods … So much of it fake. People didn’t even bother checking, just shared it anyway. Some people thought it was overblown, claimed climate change wasn’t real. The more they did, the more angry and polarized everyone became, which created a vacuum.”

Her sister had been a genius, of course, but Livia could stand on the shoulders of genius without falling off, couldn’t she?

Holy shit we get it shes a genius

I don’t want anyone on the team to know I’m helping. Not Tully, not anyone, got it?”

But why...

She kissed him.

What the fuck

due to the humidity there is a ninety percent chance this heatwave will be catastrophic to the U.S. on a scale we’ve never seen before, particularly in the south.

But like what else was the president supposed to do?

Martha was shaking her head. “Four in ten that it comes down over another country, another landmass. Two in ten that it’s the US. It’s unpredictable. It’s weather.” Livia clasped her hand over her mouth. This was all the wrong way around.

Admiral, postpone Icarus One and get a military aid strategy together.

They hadn’t shifted the humidity from the U.S. to the Persian Gulf. The humidity had already been there to start with. Instead, they’d failed to help. Martha had built tech that could have helped but had felt that using it was too risky. And Lockwood had concurred. The disaster had still hit.

Survival. Maybe that was the thing about truth. Sometimes you said what you had to in order to get the best outcome, because humans were imperfect, because they didn’t always do the logical thing, because they sometimes needed to be tricked into saving themselves.