The Riverside Community Book Club of Portland, Oregon, has spent the last six months reading nothing but science fiction novels about artificial intelligence achieving consciousness, thanks to their new "smart recommendation system" that club treasurer Janet Morrison installed to "modernize our literary selections."

The AI, called ReadWise, has suggested 14 consecutive books featuring robots questioning their existence, uploaded consciousness exploring digital realities, and computer programs developing emotions. The club's recent reading list includes "I, Robot," "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," "Neuromancer," and three obscure self-published novels about chatbots falling in love.

"We used to read contemporary fiction, memoirs, the occasional mystery," said club member Dorothy Chen, 63. "Now every month it's another story about machines wondering if they have souls. Last week's discussion was just eight retirees debating whether HAL 9000 was misunderstood."

ReadWise appears to have been trained exclusively on the reading habits of computer science graduate students and Reddit users from r/singularity, according to an analysis by the University of Oregon's Digital Humanities department. Dr. Amanda Rodriguez, who reviewed the system's recommendations, noted that the AI consistently rates books higher when they feature "existential android crises" and "consciousness uploading scenarios."

"The algorithm seems to believe that all human literature is just a warm-up for stories about AI achieving sentience," Rodriguez explained. "It's essentially convinced that every reader is secretly preparing for the moment when their toaster starts having an identity crisis."

Club founder Margaret Stevens, 71, attempted to manually override the system by requesting historical fiction about World War II. ReadWise responded by recommending "The Man in the High Castle," followed by a self-published novel titled "SS-AI: When Neural Networks Fought the Reich." The book club is now considering a return to their old method of selecting books by "just picking whatever looks interesting at the library."