One class
50-60 minutes
Free Chapter One onlyStudents separate machine performance from institutional choices, close-read David’s final working day, and make an evidence-based claim.
For high school, college, medical, and health-professions education
Teach the human consequences of AI and robotics.
A 150-page medical dystopia about what happens when AI and robotics diagnose illness, perform surgery, and treat patients better than people. What becomes of human expertise, identity, purpose, and connection when even our most demanding work can be automated? Ready-to-teach materials are available for one class, one week, or two weeks.
Best fitHigh school, college, medical and health-professions courses
Length150 pages · about 29,000 words · 27 short chapters
FormatsPaperback and Kindle
ISBN979-8-2529-9044-6
Ready-to-teach options
Choose the amount of class time you have.
Each route includes a defined reading assignment, class plan, student task, and final product. Public materials include no answer key.
One week
Five classes
The complete novel in five reading blocksFive lesson plans move from professional identity and scarcity to automated surgery, constrained choice, winners and losers, and the epilogue.
Two weeks
Ten classes
The complete novel in shorter blocksThe longer unit adds close reading, an evidence tracker, a hospital-board hearing, assessment choices, and a grading rubric.
The central idea
If surgeons can be replaced, whose work is safe?
Surgery combines compassion, broad knowledge, technical skill, judgment, and the ability to adapt quickly when a life is at stake. As AI gains the ability to reason and robotics gives it the ability to act, the novel uses one of the most demanding human professions as a stress test for every claim that a job is too physical, too complex, or too human to automate.
Classroom downloads
Everything needed to start teaching.
Start with the short lesson or use the complete kit for a full-novel unit. The slide deck is editable, and the original two-page guide remains available as a quick overview for departments and curriculum committees. The materials can be adapted for high-school classes, college seminars, medical-school teaching, and other health-professions or interdisciplinary programs.
10-page PDFComplete Teaching KitOne-class, five-day, and ten-day plans; handouts; activities; assignments; rubric.2-page PDFOne-Class LessonA 50-60 minute Chapter One lesson with an evidence sort and exit ticket.Editable PowerPointChapter One Classroom SlidesNine projection-ready slides that follow the one-class lesson.2-page PDFConcise Educator GuideA quick overview of the book, learning goals, questions, and activities.Read onlineFree Chapter OneThe complete reading for the one-class lesson.
Why it works in class
One story, several ways into the argument.
AI is already changing knowledge work. Robotics gives AI the ability to act in the physical world. Together they raise more difficult questions: What happens to people when work that gave their lives purpose no longer needs them? Are humans still needed to care for one another at their most vulnerable when machines do the job better? What will patients sacrifice or pay to preserve human connection?
Possible course settings
- English, contemporary literature, or dystopian fiction
- AI and robotics ethics, technology and society, or future of work
- Bioethics, medical humanities, or narrative medicine
- Health science, public policy, or interdisciplinary seminars
What the materials provide
- Minute-by-minute and lesson-by-lesson plans
- Student handouts, discussion prompts, and classroom slides
- Literary, bioethics, technology, and policy assignments
- A public rubric without an answer key
Learning objectives
Move from an immediate reaction to a defensible argument.
- Explain how the novel makes successful automation, rather than machine failure, its central dilemma.
- Analyze how structure, setting, characterization, irony, and the epilogue shape the reader’s response.
- Identify the capacities the novel associates with surgery and test whether they are truly unique to humans.
- Evaluate competing claims about safety, cost, access, consent, and professional responsibility.
- Trace how work shapes David’s identity, relationships, status, purpose, and mental health.
- Map how incentives and metrics influence hospitals, insurers, developers, workers, and patients.
Discussion questions
Move beyond whether AI is simply good or bad.
- Dr. Gibbons says compassion is surgery’s holy grail. Where does the novel show that presence matters even when it cannot change an outcome?
- Surgery demands knowledge, dexterity, judgment, improvisation, and calm under pressure. If machines master all five, what—if anything—remains uniquely human?
- Would you choose a human surgeon if an autonomous system had demonstrably better results and cost far less? What evidence would change your answer?
- How do insurance coverage, price, and the special consent form shape patient choice? When does a legal choice stop being a practical one?
- Why is Bobby’s successful robotic surgery more important to David’s conflict than a machine failure would have been?
- Are human beings still needed to care for one another at their most vulnerable when machines can provide better treatment? What would patients sacrifice or pay to preserve human connection?
- What does the epilogue imply about historical memory? Is the robot teacher accurate, misleading, or both?
Classroom activities
Make students defend choices, not just state opinions.
Hospital board hearing
Represent patients, clinicians, hospital leaders, insurers, the technology company, or the community. Recommend deployment terms, answer objections, and vote publicly.
Automation stress test
Choose a profession commonly described as safe from AI. Compare its knowledge, physical skill, judgment, adaptability, emotional labor, and liability with surgery.
Follow the incentives
Trace money, risk, authority, data, and accountability from the first budget crisis to the eCEO. Mark where individual decisions become a system no one person controls.
Epilogue close reading
Identify what the robot teacher gets right about human surgery, what context is missing, and how those omissions shape the children’s moral judgment.
Classroom and institutional inquiries
Bring the author into the discussion.
Virtual author discussions may be available for classrooms, book clubs, and student groups. For teaching, appearance, or classroom-ordering questions, contact the author.
Content note
Occasional strong language; discussion of suicide and job-related despair; illness, death, surgery, and medical injury; and themes of economic collapse and job loss. Recommended for upper high school, college, and adult learners. Educators should review the text for their own setting.