A.I. AND SOCIETY CONVERSATION SERIES: SPYING ON PEOPLE’S DREAMS​

Laila Lalami

4:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 25, 2025

Conversation / Q&A

University at Albany

Multi-Purpose Room, Campus Center West

1400 Washington Avenue Albany NY 12222 -  See map.

In conversation with UAlbany Political Science Professor Virginia Eubanks, author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (2018)

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Laila Lalami, major contemporary author, will present her new dystopian sci-fi novel, The Dream Hotel (2025), about a near-future world in which the surveillance state uses technology to spy on dreams. Jennifer Egan called it, “A gripping, Kafkaesque foray into an all-too-plausible future where data collection penetrates interior life.”

Lalami is the bestselling author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, winner of the Arab American Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and The Other Americans, a finalist for the National Book Award. 

NPR called her a “maestra of literary fiction.” Her acclaimed nonfiction book, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America (2020), explores the struggles of new immigrants to achieve the full rights of citizenship — drawing on her own experiences as a female, Muslim Moroccan-American.

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Cosponsored by the AI Plus Institute, UAlbany's hub for interdisciplinary AI research. For more events, visit www.albany.edu/ai-plus/institute.

Also cosponsored by the Honors College and the School of Criminal Justice’s “Justice and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century Project.”

Advance reviews

“A gripping, Kafkaesque foray into an all-too-plausible future where data collection penetrates interior life, The Dream Hotel is also an elegant meditation on identity and what we sacrifice, unthinkingly, for the sake of convenience.”
—Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Candy House

“The Dream Hotel offers a stark vision of the future—in which America is a surveillance state, ruled by the intertwined forces of capital and government, powered by all-too-fallible algorithm that determines criminality based on citizen’s dreams. That’s plainly a metaphor for extant practices of social control, but Laila Lalami’s extraordinary new novel is more than just a political warning; the book is an exploration of the psyche itself, the strange ungovernable forces of fate and emotion that make us human.” — Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind

“I loved The Dream Hotel . . . I was utterly gripped, caught up, as if I was living the same nightmare as Sara. It felt terrifyingly and convincingly close.” — Esther Freud, author of Hideous Kinky

“Stellar…There are echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale here—as Margaret Atwood does in that book, Lalami builds a convincing near-future dystopia out of current events…But Lalami’s scenario is unique and well-imagined —interspersed report sheets, transcripts, and terms-of-service lingo have a realistic, poignant lyricism that exposes the cruel bureaucracy in which Sara is trapped…And the story exposes the particular perniciousness of big tech’s capacity to exploit our every movement, indeed practically every thought…Striking…An engrossing and troubling dystopian tale.” 
— Kirkus, starred review