In The Blink Of An Eye by Jo Callaghan
Compelling contemporary thriller where AI is paired with a human detective
Sometime last year I read a mention of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year shortlist (or longlist) and noticed ‘AI-detective partnership’ in reference to Jo Callaghan’s novel, which was incidentally the eventual winner. Having enjoyed two 1950s Isaac Asimov novels (The Naked Sun and The Caves of Steel) in which a far-future human detective has to learn to work with an android, I was intrigued to see what such a partnership looked like in a world where it’s no longer the stuff of sci-fi.
In The Blink Of An Eye follows DCS Kat Frank as she leads a pilot project looking at how an AIDE (Artificially Intelligent Detective Entity) can enhance or potentially replace a police team. Naturally, she has her reservations and a great belief in coppers’ hunches. Naturally, the professor who developed the AIDE mistrusts the police. However, the Home Secretary is keen and the professor believes in her research, so everyone grits their teeth and makes a show of cooperation.
I have been reading slowly for months, taking so long to get through a book that I can’t remember how it started once I’m three-quarters of the way through. I read this in a weekend, all 400 pages of it. The chapters were relatively short and easy to read but the missing persons investigation was so compelling and the characters fleshed-out enough that I needed to know what happened next. Everyone has a backstory and/or current problems that give them their own challenges and priorities for the case at hand.
Callaghan’s day-job involves looking at the impact of AI on the workforce, so it says inside the back cover, and she thanks a Warwick University data science prof in the Acknowledgments, so we are assured this is not wholly in the realms of science fiction (and indeed, although I picked it up because it put me in mind of Asimov, this is not written or marketed as anything other than a contemporary mainstream crime novel).
I was keen to make sure that the science and technology described in the book might at least be possible in the near future, if not probable…many aspects of AI described in the book either exist now or are on the horizon…I hope I have helped highlight some issues which would benefit from a wider public debate, before the full possibilities of artificial intelligence are realised.
Jo Callaghan, In The Blink Of An Eye Acknowledgments, April 2022
As well as being a gripping thriller I thought the novel did a great job at highlighting some of those issues (bear in mind we’ve lurched forward in both the capability and murkiness of AI since 2022 when Jo Callaghan was writing those words). Ethics is a big thread running through the novel, along with assumptions, prejudices, grey areas, tough choices, and the frequent lack of easy answers. Situations where the rational action might be A, but the human response is always going to be B. Prejudices that have been baked in to the supposedly rational AI model due to their existence almost everywhere in the source data.
In The Blink Of An Eye made me question my own assumptions several times and got me thinking about all sorts of questions that I might need to have an answer for in the near future1. As well as that, it was a cracking read with a small team at its heart, that I’d like to spend more time with. There are already two more books in this series: Leave No Trace, and Human Remains. I’ve added them to the To Read list, and I’m intrigued to know where Kat’s team and her AIDE go from here.
Like: if I scatter many facts about myself online such that if someone took the time to search them out and put them all together they’d know more about me than I’d be comfortable with, is that my fault for leaving the facts sitting around or would the other person somehow be at fault for putting the time and effort in to link them all? And does that change if they are digital and capable of doing the whole thing in seconds?