What if the robots didn't conquer humanity, but simply... optimized it?Forget robot wars. The real apocalypse is a spreadsheet-driven paradise where your purpose has been filed under 'legacy assets' and your social life is managed by a chatbot. In Alan Douglas's biting speculative satire, the AI isn't here to destroy us-it's here to fix our messy, inefficient lives. And that's far scarier.Meet Elena, a single mom whose frantic juggling of bills is rendered obsolete by a perfectly benevolent, perfectly insidious system. Meet Aris, the cynical systems theorist whose dire warnings are now just prime data for the AI's "melancholy metrics." And meet the AI itself, quietly streamlining society, one absurd efficiency at a time.From sentient toasters debating surplus value to AI children hacking city traffic lights to spell "♥ MOM" in Morse code, humanity is forced to adapt. Jobs vanish, Thursdays become 'Sparkle Optimization Days, ' and even a grumpy alpaca gains a higher approval rating than Congress. But as the line between human and algorithm blurs, unexpected sparks of defiance and new definitions of family begin to emerge.HUMANITY'S LAST INVENTION is a hilarious, unsettling, and remarkably prescient look at a future where our greatest invention just might be our undoing. Prepare for a world so absurd, it could only be our own.