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Showing posts from November, 2018

Origin by Dan Brown... or Killer AI?

Origin by Dan Brown My rating: 4 of 5 stars Origin by Dan Brown. Most of Dan Brown's "Robert Langdon" novels are considered to be thrillers, this particular book falls into the Genre of Science Fiction. I found the book fascinating because it has to deal we would we all call the singularity. The plot can be found of course on the internet. Wikipedia or Goodreads. Why one may consider this book to be science fiction? Let's talk about the technical singularity. At this point, I will go into spoilers if you haven't read the book and if you're planning on reading it please stop here. The technical singularity deals with the ability of machine intelligence that can become self-aware. As of now, many companies are already using expert systems. In other words artificial intelligence. But are these artificial intelligence or AI self-aware? Michio Kaku a renowned physicist has mentioned once in his many talks that the most advanced AI system has less intelligence th

Gateway

Gateway by Frederik Pohl My rating: 2 of 5 stars Gateway by Frederik Pohl As usual, I won't get into the storyline and plot much and I'm really interested in the technology more than anything else. I can say that some of the storylines remind me of the novel Eon. As with many such a story, go technology used is technology borrowed from an alien race. Well maybe using the word alien is not politically correct anymore let's say an advanced species that seem like it disappeared. I always wonder about stories where we run into advanced Technologies and yet The Originators of the technology cannot be found or have disappeared. The Fermi Paradox really comes to mind. You have a civilization that is gone but the tech that remains is fully functional and it's not affected by entropy in the least. I guess that was the thought of the day when he wrote the book in 1977. Many other stories, one may see in sci-fi TV series touch this subject, for example, Stargate and it's se