Hereby Monsters is a podcast about facing the unknown. I, uh, I start to float, float away from the earth. Have you ever smoked crack before? We're all kind of frantically searching for meaning. They have the neurotransmitters. I think we're all jugglers in some way. Yo, we're not broken. Crazy delinquents. We're in our last day, young man. Listen to Hear Be Monsters.

The podcast about the unknown.

On the KCRW iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timber.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Louisa Hall.

She's the author of her second novel.

This book is called Speak, and it's published by Echo Press and I found it to be a fascinating book

largely about what makes human communication human and what it is that goes out of that communication when it's produced on a computer by program.

And the question, the huge question that Alan Turing invented,

how can you tell if what you're speaking to on computer

is a program or a human?

It's called, I think, the Turing test.

And in this book, in the present tense of the book, in the year 2040, I think, a toy, a companion known as a baby bot, a baby robot, has been taken off the market.

It's too lifelike the children who had it, fell too deeply in love with them.

They were totally alone with their baby bots and developing antisocial behaviors.

...