From: Jim Fehlinger (fehlinger@home.com)
Date: Wed Nov 10 1999 - 05:36:59 MST
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> "J. R. Molloy" wrote:
>
> Actually, the very eve of Singularity, when superintelligent AI is no
> longer some never-k'never but an immediate prospect, is when I expect
> some of the largest social problems. Remember, we haven't won until the
> SI has nanotechnology.
William Gibson's latest, _All Tomorrow's Parties_, his third "bridge"
novel
(after _Virtual Light_ and _Idoru_), is a Singularity Eve story about an
AI
getting hold of nanotech.
SPOILERS
It's an entertaining book, not because Gibson has the imaginative sweep
of
Greg Egan, but because of the detailed texture of Gibson's descriptive
prose coupled with his wicked sense of humor. In a sense, we've been
here
before with _Neuromancer_ (in which an AI gets loose and precipitates a
singularity of sorts), but the technological mix has a more late-90's
feel
(no "jacking into the matrix", just accessing the Web with smart
sunglasses;
no chip implants in the brain, no orbital habitats, but nanotech --
explicitly
so-called -- on the horizon).
The AI in this story is Rei Toei, the Idoru, a Japanese virtual pop
icon,
who has given her employers the slip and gotten herself GlobEx'ed from
Tokyo to
San Francisco inside a high-tech holographic projector, where something
Big
is about to happen.
There is also Colin Laney, former associate of the Idoru's,
who has quit his job and is in hiding in a community of the homeless
living
in cardboard boxes in the depths of the Tokyo subway. He is aware of
the approaching singularity because of his ability to see "nodal points"
is the past and the future, due to his exposure to an experimental drug
in childhood (one of the less-plausible elements of the story). Laney
watches the approaching nodal point with his data goggles from his
cardboard
box, where he subsists on sugar, caffeine, and cough syrup, and
coordinates
the movements of Berry Rydell, the "rent-a-cop" from Gibson's earlier
"bridge"
novels, whom he has hired to quit his job in L.A. and travel to San
Francisco
to look after Rei Toei.
The "baddie" in all this is Cody Harwood, a shadowy billionaire and
power-behind-the-throne who is explicitly compared to Bill Gates in the
book. He is also aware of the coming nodal point, and his priority is
to
make sure that he wields the same power after the shift as he has
before,
even if he has to kill people to do so. He has hired a team of
world-class
assassins to carry out his instructions.
The nanotechnology in the book is about to be unleashed on the world
(and this is one of the points where Gibson's sense of humor is evident)
by means of a chain of "Lucky Dragon" convenience stores (a sort of
Seven-Eleven out of Singapore), which is about to install a system of
"nanofax" machines to enable scanning and assembling of physical objects
all around the world. Harwood is the brains behind this rollout;
the convenience-store service is simply a "front" to enable him to
deploy
a world-wide network of assemblers/disassemblers -- what real use they
will
turn out to have, even Harwood is not certain.
It's all set in the usual Gibsonian milieu of knife-wielding hustlers
and street criminals, ninja assassins, and heavy-handed corporate types.
It's a quick, fun read.
Jim F.
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