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Galatea 2.2
- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 14 hrs and 31 mins
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Publisher's summary
After four novels and several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2 - Richard Powers - returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for exisiting.
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Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Trevor C.
- 07-28-21
Complex verbiage with a very self-centered focus
The narrator was really great, the idea of the story was really great, but it was just too difficult to listen through it. I am an artificial intelligence researcher and was intrigued by the description of the book, but the storytelling was too slow and it felt more like an autobiography of the main character with the number of very ordinary characters doing very ordinary things and talking in very ordinary ways. For a science fiction story it has a very traditional old-fashioned feeling which to me would be more appropriate in stories of yesteryear as opposed to an artificial intelligence.
The book is very well written and very well spoken. it just feels more like an author's attempt to be crafty with language than an exciting compelling story of an artificial intelligence.
if you are into fancy words and literary accomplishments then this book is probably going to be fantastic for you but if you are looking for a state-of-the-art story about an artificial intelligence with previously unachieved capabilities then I'm not so sure this book is for you. There is a chance it may get way better in those regards but I can't listen to it any longer and I'm sorry for that, it's a reflection of my own lack of patience and that's my shortcoming, not the shortcoming of the author.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Darrell Rohling
- 06-02-21
Highly literary, big philosophical questions but grounded in relationships...
Brilliant craftsmanship, but no ‘easy’ reading. If you dig fast-pace, thriller-type stories, this one’s not for you.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Michael G Kurilla
- 07-08-23
Doesn't pass the Turing test
Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 is a 90’s story of artificial intelligence (AI). As such, it has become dated rather quickly. The tale is semi-autobiographical as the main character uses the author’s name and is a writer. He ends up in a year long project to ‘train’ a rudimentary AI in literature to test against a human at the level of graduate exams. Along the way, there are flashbacks to an eventual failed romance as well as a new romantic interest that never pans out. In the end, the AI determines that it cannot never enjoy experiences like a human and prefers to be deactivated.
Powers spends much time discussing the difficulty training an AI regarding language especially for which there is no physical component to experience. At the same, the variety of the English language to use the same word with distinct meaning crops up all the time. The failed romantic interludes were downright painful to watch. In the end, this is a tale of a socially awkward human who fixates on a digital persona to meet his needs.
The narration is reasonable with decent character distinction. Pacing is smooth and even.
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- Nancy Mercep
- 08-06-22
Intellectual query
Captivating for Richard Powers lovers. Depth of his language thrills if you enjoy the well chosen word
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- Andrew Rojecki
- 09-28-19
Powers emerging power in evidence, but not fully
he is a wonderful writer. the characters, the development of H as cognition and learning system, the language and writer struggle ..all are memorable and well articulated.
his humanness is deep and attractive. but
the love interests are a novel (c) and s very short story (a) . these didn't work for me. too overwraught and seemingly unconnected to the work with H.
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- Anonymous User
- 08-29-23
Beautiful story
Another fascinating Richard Powers book ahead of its time.
Will be a good read for those interested in AI and themes that inspect the human condition.
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Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: John Skelley
- Length: 13 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spring of 1914, renowned photographer August Sander took a photograph of three young men on their way to a country dance. This haunting image, capturing the last moments of innocence on the brink of World War I, provides the central focus of Powers' brilliant and compelling novel. As the fate of the three farmers is chronicled, two contemporary stories unfold.
By: Richard Powers
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Gain
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 17 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Gain braids together two stories on very different scales. In one, Laura Body, divorced mother of two and a real estate agent in the small town of Lacewood, Illinois, plunges into a new existence when she learns she has ovarian cancer. In the other, Clare & Company, a soap manufacturer begun by three brothers in 19th-century Boston, grows over the course of a century and a half into an international consumer products conglomerate based in Laura's hometown.
By: Richard Powers
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The Echo Maker
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 20 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, returns to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a coma, Mark believes that this woman is really an impostor who looks just like his sister. Shattered, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, who eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines even his own sense of being.
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Too much time for a boring story
- By HannahMK on 08-06-20
By: Richard Powers
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The Time of Our Singing
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez
- Length: 33 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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On Easter day, 1939, at Marian Anderson's epochal concert on the Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish emigre scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Philadelphia Negro studying to be a singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and - against all odds and better judgment - they marry. They vow to raise their children beyond time, beyond identity, steeped in song. But their three children must survive America's brutal here and now.
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Undigested Erudition
- By Dr. Blue Jacaranda on 11-11-20
By: Richard Powers
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Generosity
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: David Pittu
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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What will happen to life when science identifies the genetic basis of happiness? Who will own the patent? Do we dare revise our own temperaments? Funny, fast, and magical, Generosity celebrates both science and the freed imagination. In his most exuberant book yet, Richard Powers asks us to consider the big questions facing humankind as we begin to rewrite our own existence.
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All About Fiction
- By James on 11-30-10
By: Richard Powers
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Bewilderment
- A Novel
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Theo Byrne is a promising young astrobiologist who has found a way to search for life on other planets dozens of light years away. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. His son, Robin, is funny, loving, and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, adores animals, and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures. He is also on the verge of being expelled from third grade for smashing his friend's face with a metal thermos.
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Not Usually a Richard Powers Fan
- By Billy on 09-28-21
By: Richard Powers
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The Likely World
- A Novel
- By: Melanie Conroy-Goldman
- Narrated by: Erica Sullivan
- Length: 15 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Twenty years of addiction to cloud, a drug which wipes the user’s short-term memory, have left single mom Mellie with her mind in fragments. With the help of a tough-minded sponsor, and motivated by her own medically challenged daughter, Mellie clings to a fragile sobriety. Then, on the evening of her 29th day sober, a stranger pulls into her driveway and her heart surges. However, when Mellie’s pursuit of this man and the past they may share threatens her sponsor, Mellie will have to put her tiny family and her recovery at risk in hopes of saving the woman who saved her first.
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Couldn’t stop listening
- By Peggy shea on 04-23-23
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The Fortress of Solitude
- By: Jonathan Lethem
- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 18 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification."
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A smorgasbord of language
- By Jonathan on 10-21-03
By: Jonathan Lethem
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The Overstory
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.
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eye opening
- By Michael Stansberry on 05-23-18
By: Richard Powers
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The Bartender's Tale
- By: Ivan Doig
- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The Bartender' s Tale stars Tom Harry and his 12-year-old son, Rusty, who live alone and run a bar in a small Montana town in the early 1960s. Their lives are upended when Proxy, a woman from Tom's past, and her beatnik daughter, Francine, breeze into town. Is Francine, as Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy of her and Tom’s past? Without a doubt she is an unsettling gust of the future, upending every certainty in Rusty’s life and generating a mist of passion and pretense that seems to obscure everyone’s vision but his own.
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If you love a good story ...
- By B.J. on 03-08-13
By: Ivan Doig
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The Last Dog on Earth
- By: Adrian J. Walker
- Narrated by: Jonathan Aris, David John
- Length: 13 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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It's the end of the world, but Reg won't mind the peace and quiet - after all, he's always lived a solitary life. And his happy-go-lucky dog, Lineker, is ecstatic to spend more time with his beloved owner. Together, they plan to wait out the impending doom in their second-floor apartment, hiding themselves away from the riots outside. But when an abandoned orphan shows up in the stairwell of their building, Reg and Lineker must leave their place of safety and accompany her into the ruins of a fallen city.
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The dog is ok.
- By Meloxicami on 09-17-20
By: Adrian J. Walker
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Ghostwritten
- By: David Mitchell
- Narrated by: William Rycroft
- Length: 15 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Oblivious to the bizarre ways in which their lives intersect, nine characters - a terrorist in Okinawa, a record-shop clerk in Tokyo, a money-laundering British financier in Hong Kong, an old woman running a tea shack in China, a transmigrating "noncorpum" entity seeking a human host in Mongolia, a gallery-attendant-cum-art-thief in Petersburg, a drummer in London, a female physicist in Ireland, and a radio deejay in New York - hurtle toward a shared destiny of astonishing impact.
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An Embryonic Version of Cloud Atlas
- By Darwin8u on 05-29-13
By: David Mitchell
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Woman on the Edge of Time
- A Novel
- By: Marge Piercy
- Narrated by: Tanya Eby
- Length: 14 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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