AI Year One is a novel focused on how ordinary people survive the upheaval caused by AI in the near future. In the first year of AI, as the technology permeates every industry, the owner of a hardware factory, Liu Jinfeng, his wife, Xu Fangfang, their daughter, Liu Quan, and her boyfriend, Zhang Lei, find themselves caught in the tide of the ghost GDP era. One by one, intelligent systems squeeze them out of their livelihoods. Liu Quan, a graduate student, uses her eyes and voice recorder to document how these people, left behind by the speeding train of progress, search for their own paths amid family separations, the loss of their jobs, and the erosion of their dignity. With a cool, restrained touch, the book paints a social allegory of the AI age and asks: when efficiency becomes the only standard, what value is left in lives that are not efficient enough?
