Why do people not want to be happy? And how can it be that only a machine can find the true path to happiness? For all readers of Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me.

DER ALGORITHMUS DER MENSCHLICHKEIT
(The Algorithm of Humanity)
by Vera Buck
Limes/PRH Germany, March 2021

If you meet Mari, you will notice that she is beautiful and almost hauntingly perfect. But also that she fails to get jokes and vies everything rationally. And if you get to know her better, you will notice that Mari needs neither sleep nor food. Because Mari is only almost human. Her artificial intelligence is constantly learning to do one job: to make people happy. When Mari ends up in a Berlin apartment after an unfortunate chain of circumstances with a motley crew of people, including the rebellious blogger Frieda and the lonely student Linus, she realizes that her mission is all but easy. The world follows its own logic, people’s desires are irrational and Mari has to understand that there exists a world beyond provable facts. How is she supposed to make beings happy that have no clue what they want? She comes up with a solution no human would have ever expected… DER ALGORITHMUS DER MENSCHLICHKEIT deals with questions that are becoming incredibly important in the current developments in the technology sector: What makes us human? Why do we need each other? And why do we actually need more of each other, and less of the new technologies that are constantly being developed?

Vera Buck, born in 1986, studied journalism in Hannover and scriptwriting on Hawaii. During this time she wrote texts for radio, television and print media and later short stories for anthologies and literary magazines. After working at universities in France, Spain and Italy, Vera Buck now lives and works in Zürich.