GoKawiilNew Andersen novel imagines U.S. civil war sparked by AI-linked violence
Kurt Andersen's novel 'The Breakup' depicts a fictional 2045 America split by a civil war triggered by a 'robot massacre' following a terrorist attack. The story follows the divorce of a pro-AI United States and an anti-AI 'Free American Republic,' mirrored by the personal separation of a San Francisco AI researcher and his skeptical wife in Tennessee. The piece situates this fiction within a longer history of robot narratives, tracing anxieties about artificial beings back to the 1920 Czech play 'R.U.R.'