Flybot

Dennis E. Taylor strikes again

The Book
The hardest thing about reading Dennis Taylor is that he’s so close to my inner computer nerd, that I recognize that I don’t have as many of those associates as I used to. I’m on something of a divergent path as a digital mushroom, and it’s only when I’m reading somebody like Daniel C. Dennett or Raymond Smullyan that I recall when I used to live inside self-imposed logic gates. I still get the jolts of geek juice occasionally, but it was during this summer when it really smacked me.

What I’m talking about is Taylor’s latest fiction which veers away from the Bobiverse and outer space and move front and center to domestic affairs in the US of A. Corporate intrigue, the technical cadres of the Genius class who use the term ‘administrivia’. People who are not too smart for their own good, but well accommodated to the arcane nature of their careers of technical or academic specialty.

Right away what I have to say about the end of this book is that it is something I don’t think I’ve seen in much of any sci-fi but something more out of Agatha Christie or Michael Connolly. I’ve never been much into mysteries or police procedurals, although I really did enjoy reading John Sandford for several years. Just because the good guys won. And while I dig the loops and turns and ever-increasing tension of the dilemmas faced by characters of the novels of Craig Alanson (Expeditionary Force) and Jim Butcher (Harry Dresden), there was nothing quite preparing me to follow the mysterious twists and turns of Taylor’s Flybot.

In fact, the last chapter, the epilogue of this intrigue is so gobsmackingly revelatory that I reread it about seven times before I could get over the depth of the deception at the heart of the story. It is the kind of deception that could only be carried out by a superintelligence. I’m telling you that Taylor has presaged a new genre of mystery writing that combines the kind of complexity we simply haven’t imagined before. There’s a level of fantastic possibility here that’s as treacherous as any Cold War mole hunt and as meticulously planned as any game theoretical puzzle imagined by Professor Moriarty.

Flybot is a murder mystery wrapped inside an industrial espionage investigation surrounded by a terrorist plot involving a corporate takeover that brings two clever researchers into a dangerous proximity to a devious criminal gang, an escalating set of environmental protests, a number of scientific breakthroughs and mind-bending plot twists. The only thing that comes close to this sort of writing is that by Daniel Suarez, except this one is up close and personal. I can see this scaling up.

The Reality
The plausibility of this sci-fi is a bit beyond what’s possible today, but it’s hard science fiction. This could take place 10 years from tomorrow. What’s astonishing about it is that it gives us a look at the sort of consequential decisions making that is embedded as a capability within institutions that exist today, but are not actually being made. It simply requires the kind of broad intelligence and authority over which no set of agencies are currently capable of coordinating. In a way similar to Arthur Conan Doyle, author Dennis Taylor is astute in recognizing how social conventions of the day might be easily defied by a crafty intelligence willing to break any and all conventions. Alas Taylor has not gone to the depth of Suarez in making this as much of a thriller as it might have been. Taylor would not subject us to the cold calculations of Cixin Liu or the horror of Peter Watts, but this may very well be the beginning. Taylor is interested, as always, to see the good guy unbroken, it is part of his brand of American enthusiasm, a kind of self-effacing and humble moral consideration we want all of our scientists to embrace. If Taylor does not take us on a darker journey, somebody else will. Someone like Paolo Bacigalupi might do so.

At any rate, I am intrigued by the probabilities to be etched into new fictions that will allow us to envision what happens when artificial intelligences become engaged in more and more of human institutions and can operate with the kind of agency we politically keep away from our current institutions. When we enable disciplines that dehumanize decision-making, even deceitful and inhuman decision-making, there will be nothing like the level of surprise we are likely to encounter. Honor among thieves will not be a shortcut for us to understand the motives of computer aided murder. There will be no cultural values for us to parse and we will be fooled by randomness.

I’ve often thought, after watching a film like Manhunter, how a serial killer might decide to act on days and situations generated by completely random computations. When motive and opportunity are driven by situations no human psyche would plan, what would detectives think about? This goes beyond the complexity of Moscow Rules into realms of paranoia perviously inconceivable. This vector gets so dark that I don’t even want to speculate about it.

The Future
Honestly, I’m hedging all of my AI bets and if I were to go looking for a new career in this industry it would be looking closely at probabilistic computing and the commercialization of a guardrail framework. Next generation Norton Utilities for naive corpos who are automating on instinct. I guarantee you there are going to be some epic fails in the next few years and there are going to be new types of asymmetric multi-vector threats that poke holes in a lot of theories of crime. It’s going to be like the 1990s where nobody hijacks planes like they did in the 70s - where all of the terrorist stories are still talking about the Bakaa Valley and it’s about to be 2001 and we’re still pining away for Kubrick’s idea of a Pan Am Space Shuttle. We’re thinking Javascript is the coolest thing in the world, then wham.

The Warning
Humans have evolved defensive emotions against insects. These emotions are not wrong. We are much more likely to encounter insectile intelligences before we even get up to serpentine intelligences. Keep that in mind.