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The Guardian
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami review – what if AI could read our minds?
Arriving home at Los Angeles international airport, Sara Hussein is asked by immigration and customs officers to step aside, then taken to an interview room. The fundamentals of this scene are familiar – you've probably watched something like it in a film, or dreamed about it happening to you; perhaps it already has. But Sara lives in a new world, several decades in the future, and she is being arrested because Scout, the state's AI security system, has flagged something irregular inside her mind. Sara seems unexceptional: she's a museum archivist, married and mother to young twins. She once had an argument with her husband Elias after he impulsively part-exchanged the family Toyota for a Volvo. Sara sees herself as a person who 'couldn't possibly be considered a member of the lawbreaking classes', until the moment at the airport when an officer informs her that her 'risk score' is too high, and sends her to Madison, a California women's retention centre housed in a former elementary school. At Madison, a record of good behaviour will lower her score; however, this record lies in the hands of her guards. She is not sufficiently subordinate, and can't get her number down. 'Retainees' are held initially for 21 days, then on a rolling basis, potentially for ever. This isn't punishment but risk management, for anybody considered likely to commit a crime. Every citizen has a risk score, extrapolated via algorithm from personal cloud data, from surveillance networks, and from the Dreamsaver – a widely used skull implant that delivers more restful sleep. The small print of Dreamsaver Inc grants the company rights to share the user's dreams with the government. People are OK with this; it seems to have reduced terrorism. The Dream Hotel is Laila Lalami's fifth novel – earlier works received nominations for the Booker, Pulitzer and National book awards – and has been longlisted for the Women's prize. Her 2020 nonfiction book, Conditional Citizens, draws on her experiences as a Moroccan American to think about her adopted country's two-tier system: how rights and freedoms are, in practice, exercised very differently across race, class, gender and national origin. Lalami's fiction has explored the way these differences play out across a range of times and places: from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), on migrant experiences in modern Morocco, to The Moor's Account (2014), inspired by the true story of a 16th-century Black man who survived a notorious Spanish colonial expedition to the Americas. Her most recent novel, 2019's The Other Americans, is set in California in the shadow of the Iraq war, and follows the causes and repercussions of the moment when Driss, a Moroccan immigrant, is killed at an intersection by a speeding car. In The Dream Hotel, Lalami turns to the future. The novel is especially interesting as a vision of how AI could weave itself into the two-tier system that she has described and reimagined in earlier works. Sara contrasts the apparent neutrality of Scout's 'new era of digital policing' with the racist treatment her Moroccan immigrant parents received at US airports during her childhood. However, familiar prejudices are built into new tools, which search for specific deviations from an enforced norm. Some bad arguments and weird dreams, a relative who has been in prison and a history of drug use are enough for conviction. Sara's medical notes link to a record documenting that she was the victim of a sexual assault when she was 19. This adds three points to her risk score. Reading The Dream Hotel is a physical experience: it's rare for a novel to induce so strong a sense of powerlessness and frustration. Like many technologies, Lalami's AI renders its users, from the individual to the state, simultaneously smarter and more stupid. It harvests vast quantities of data, then fundamentally misunderstands it. Meanwhile retainees' hearings are randomly deferred; visits denied; phone calls cut off and overcharged; privacies invaded. 'Prison is a place beyond shame.' Sara gradually absorbs the reality that she has become one of the people the state can punish. She dispatches emails of complaint to an interface whose blank replies denote impunity: 'We are working to resolve service disruptions'; 'This ticket is marked as resolved.' In this sharp, sophisticated novel of forecasts and insightful takes, what I found most powerful was the great bewilderment that the characters share. Lalami traces the upheaval of AI through systems and structures into personal lives, close relationships and quiet thoughts. Sara privately questions whether she has a hidden potential for violence. An interlude at the centre of the novel follows a tech executive who is straining to make sense of her vast yet miserable power. Perhaps you wouldn't ordinarily pick up a novel in search of an experience of confusion. But The Dream Hotel has a burning quality, both in its swift, consuming escalation – you can't look away – and in the clarity and purpose of what it shows. Sara is drawn into the bizarre logic through which imprisonment and a two-tier system make one another make sense. 'She must've done something,' says one new retainee of a longtime resident. 'I mean, if they're keeping her here this long, then they must have something on her.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
New York Times
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
What if Your Dreams Could Land You in Prison?
'The Dream Hotel,' the fifth novel by the acclaimed Moroccan American writer Laila Lalami, is set in a near-future reality only a notch or two on the dystopian dial away from our present. Its protagonist, Sara Hussein, is a museum archivist in her late 30s, living in Los Angeles with her husband, Elias, and their toddler twins. As a new mother suffering the rigors of insomnia, she finds relief in something called a Dreamsaver, an ingenious neuroprosthetic device that ensures high-quality sleep. Embedded in the device's terms of service, however, is a clause allowing the extraction and sale of its users' biometrical data, including the content of their dreams. Sara becomes aware of this only when she is detained at LAX on her return from a conference in London. It's a couple of decades in the future, and the state keeps tabs on its citizens by way of a risk score — somewhere between China's social credit system and a credit rating — which calculates the likelihood of their committing a crime. Among the data sources for such assessments are dreams, supplied wholesale by the makers of the Dreamsaver. And Sara has been having dreams about poisoning her husband, which the government's Risk Assessment Administration (R.A.A.) reads, with insistent literal-mindedness, as a direct expression of a desire. Lalami's dystopian premise here will be familiar to anyone who has read Philip K. Dick's novella 'The Minority Report' (or seen the 2002 Spielberg adaptation), set in a future where people are incarcerated for offenses they have yet to commit. 'The Dream Hotel' shares some of this dystopian DNA, but the forebear it nods most knowingly toward is Kafka. At one point, an incarcerated Sara recalls a trip to Prague, and a visit to the Castle; later she checks out 'The Metamorphosis' from the prison library. Sara spends most of the novel attempting to negotiate the nightmarishly dense bureaucracy of the R.A.A., and of the so-called retention system in which she is being held. Though the initial period of retention is only 21 days, the staff at Madison, the facility where she is kept, find continual cause for extension. 'Retainees' perform unpaid labor on behalf of the private corporation that runs the facility. They are constantly breaking rules they didn't know existed; once you're in the system, it quickly becomes clear, your detention, which is entirely at the pleasure of an unseen and 'holistic' algorithm, is essentially indefinite. Safe-X, the company that runs the retention facilities, makes most of its money 'from the postponements it generated through its complicated disciplinary system.' Despite the influence of Kafka and Dick, the novel's most obvious reference points are in the American present. One long and vivid sequence takes place against the backdrop of a Los Angeles consumed by wildfire. And anyone who has had the misfortune to find themselves snarled in the gears of Customs and Border Protection at a U.S. airport might read the extended account of Sara's initial detention with sweaty palms and a racing heart. Though not much is explicitly made of it, Sara shares with her creator a Moroccan background; the notion of people being punished for the perceived likelihood of committing a crime might seem less speculative to readers of Middle Eastern heritage. The book also clearly has its sights set on what Shoshana Zuboff terms 'surveillance capitalism,' as well as on the kind of algorithmic, predatory policing discussed in Jackie Wang's 'Carceral Capitalism.' Lalami's social critique has a righteous vigor, but as fiction 'The Dream Hotel' often feels inert: Once the novel has set out its nightmarish stall, not much happens beyond an insistent delineation of the boredom and sadness and absurdity of Sara's situation. It might seem odd to critique a book set almost entirely in a carceral facility on the grounds of its feeling airless and entrapping, but this has less to do with its narrative than its failure to break its provocative premise free of the walls around it. The third-person present-tense narration keeps us close to Sara's thoughts, but those thoughts too often reveal the presence of a heavy editorializing hand. And so we find her thinking, for instance, 'it's the parasitic logic of profit, which has wormed its way so deeply into the collective mind that to defy lucre is to mark oneself as a radical, or a criminal, or a lunatic.' Her train of thought is, elsewhere, pressed into service as a vehicle for plot exposition: 'OmniCloud continues to grow at an astonishing pace, Sara thinks, its only serious competition the Chinese conglomerate that a handful of senators want to outlaw.' Still, the novel's central vision — a world in which the most private aspects of people's inner lives are extracted and sold — retains an insidious power, and an uncomfortable relevance.
