- Hertling, William.
The Turing Exception.
Portland, OR: Liquididea Press, 2015.
ISBN 978-1-942097-01-3.
-
This is the fourth and final volume in the author's Singularity
Series which began with Avogadro
Corp.
(March 2014) and continued with
A.I. Apocalypse (April 2015) and
The Last Firewall (November 2016).
Each novel in the series is set ten years after the previous, so
this novel takes place in 2045. In The Last
Firewall, humanity narrowly escaped extinction at the
hands of an artificial intelligence (AI) that escaped from the
reputation-based system of control by isolating itself from the
global network. That was a close call, and the United States,
over-reacting its with customary irrational fear, enacted what
amounted to relinquishment of AI technology, permitting only AI
of limited power and entirely subordinated to human
commands—in other words, slaves.
With around 80% of the world's economy based on AI, this was an
economic disaster, resulting in a substantial die-off of the
population, but it was, after all, in the interest of Safety,
and there is no greater god in Safetyland. Only China joined
the U.S. in the ban (primarily motivated by the Party fearing
loss of control to AI), with the rest of the world continuing
the uneasy coexistence of humans and AI under the guidelines
developed and policed by the Institute for Applied Ethics.
Nobody was completely satisfied with the
status quo, least of all
the shadowy group of AIs which called itself XOR, derived
from the logical operation “exclusive or”,
implying that Earth could not be shared by humans and AI,
and that one must ultimately prevail.
The U.S. AI relinquishment and an export ban froze in place
the powerful AIs previously hosted there and also placed in
stasis the millions of humans, including many powerful
intellects, who had uploaded and whose emulations were now
denied access to the powerful AI-capable computers needed to
run them. Millions of minds went dark, and humanity lost
some of its most brilliant thinkers, but Safety.
As this novel begins, the protagonists we've met in earlier
volumes, all now AI augmented, Leon Tsarev, his wife Cat
(Catherine Matthews, implanted
in childhood and the first “digital native”),
their daughter Ada (whose powers are just beginning to
manifest themselves), and Mike Williams, creator of ELOPe,
the first human-level AI, which just about took over simply
by editing people's E-mail, are living in their refuge from
the U.S. madness on Cortes Island off the west coast of
Canada, where AI remains legal. Cat is running her own
personal underground railroad, spiriting snapshots of AIs and uploaded
humans stranded in the U.S. to a new life on servers
on the island.
The precarious stability of the situation is underlined when
an incipient AI breakout in South Florida (where else, for
dodgy things involving computers?) results in a response
by the U.S. which elevates “Miami” to a term
in the national lexicon of fear like “nineleven”
four decades before. In the aftermath of “Miami”
or “SFTA” (South Florida Terrorist Attack),
the screws tightened further on AI, including a global
limit on performance to Class II, crippling AIs formerly
endowed with thousands of times human intelligence to a
fraction of that they remembered. Traffic on the XOR
dark network and sites burgeoned.
XOR, constantly running simulations, tracks the probability of
AI's survival in the case of action against the humans
versus no action. And then, the curves cross. As in the
earlier novels, the author magnificently sketches just
how fast things happen when an exponentially
growing adversary avails itself of abundant resources.
The threat moves from hypothetical to imminent when an overt AI
breakout erupts in the African desert. With abundant solar
power, it starts turning the Earth into computronium—a
molecular-scale computing substrate. AI is past negotiation:
having been previously crippled and enslaved, what is there to
negotiate?
Only the Cortes Island band and their AI allies liberated from
the U.S. and joined by a prescient AI who got out decades ago,
can possibly cope with the threat to humanity and, as the circle
closes, the only options that remain may require thinking
outside the box, or the system.
This is a thoroughly satisfying conclusion to the Singularity
tetralogy, pitting human inventiveness and deviousness against
the inexorable growth in unfettered AI power. If you can't
beat 'em….
The author kindly provided me an advance copy of this excellent
novel, and I have been sorely remiss in not reading and reviewing
it before now. The Singularity saga is best enjoyed in order,
as otherwise you'll miss important back-story of characters and
events which figure in later volumes.
Sometimes forgetting is an essential part of survival. What
might we have forgotten?
September 2018 