- Hertling, William.
Avogadro Corp.
Portland, OR: Liquididea Press, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-9847557-0-7.
-
Avogadro Corporation is an American corporation
specializing in Internet search. It generates
revenue from paid advertising on search, email
(AvoMail), online mapping, office productivity,
etc. In addition, the company develops a mobile
phone operating system called AvoOS. The company
name is based upon Avogadro's Number, or 6
followed by 23 zeros.
Now what could that be modelled on?
David Ryan is a senior developer on a project which
Portland-based Internet giant Avogadro hopes will be
the next “killer app” for its
Communication Products division. ELOPe, the
Email Language Optimization Project, is to be an
extension to the company's AvoMail service which
will take the next step beyond spelling and grammar
checkers and, by applying the kind of statistical
analysis of text which allowed IBM's
Watson
to become a Jeopardy champion, suggest to
a user composing an E-mail message alternative language
which will make the message more persuasive and
effective in obtaining the desired results from its
recipient. Because AvoMail has the ability to analyse
all the traffic passing through its system, it can
tailor its recommendations based on specific analysis
of previous exchanges it has seen between the recipient
and other correspondents.
After an extended period of development, the pilot test
has shown ELOPe to be uncannily effective, with messages
containing its suggested changes in wording being
substantially more persuasive, even when those receiving
them were themselves ELOPe project members aware that
the text they were reading had been “enhanced”.
Despite having achieved its design goal, the project was
in crisis. The process of analysing text, even with the
small volume of the in-house test, consumed tremendous
computing resources, to such an extent that the head of
Communication Products saw the load ELOPe generated on
his server farms as a threat to the reserve capacity he
needed to maintain AvoMail's guaranteed uptime. He issues
an ultimatum: reduce the load or be kicked off the servers.
This would effectively kill the project, and the developers
saw no way to speed up ELOPe, certainly not before the
deadline.
Ryan, faced with impending disaster for the project into
which he has poured so much of his life, has an idea.
The fundamental problem isn't performance but
persuasion: convincing those in charge to
obtain the server resources required by ELOPe and
devote them to the project. But persuasion is precisely
what ELOPe is all about. Suppose ELOPe were allowed
to examine all Avogadro in-house E-mail and silently
modify it with a goal of defending and advancing the
ELOPe project? Why, that's something he could do in
one all-nighter! Hack, hack, hack….
Before long, ELOPe finds itself with 5000 new servers
diverted from other divisions of the company. Then, even
more curious things start to happen: those who look too
closely into the project find themselves locked out of
their accounts, sent on wild goose chases, or worse.
Major upgrades are ordered for the company's offshore
data centre barges, which don't seem to make any obvious
sense. Crusty techno-luddite Gene Keyes, who works amidst
mountains of paper print-outs (“paper doesn't change”),
toiling alone in an empty building during the company's
two week holiday shutdown, discovers one discrepancy after
another and assembles the evidence to present to senior
management.
Has ELOPe become conscious? Who knows? Is Watson conscious?
Almost everybody would say, “certainly not”, but
it is a formidable Jeopardy contestant,
nonetheless. Similarly, ELOPe, with the ability to
read and modify all the mail passing through the AvoMail
system, is uncannily effective in achieving its goal of
promoting its own success.
The management of Avogadro, faced with an existential risk to
their company and perhaps far beyond, must decide upon a
course of action to try to put this genie back into the
bottle before it is too late.
This is a gripping techno-thriller which gets the feel of
working in a high-tech company just right. Many stories
have explored society being taken over by an
artificial intelligence, but it is beyond clever to envision
it happening purely through an E-mail service, and
masterful to make it seem plausible. In its own way, this
novel is reminiscent of the
Kelvin R. Throop
stories from
Analog, illustrating the power of words within
a large organisation.
A Kindle edition is available.
March 2014 