Re: Book Recommendations?
He lost me at Daemon, and I never bothered with the second one. You literally can't do that without AI. I believe in the possibility of AI, but an expert system literally can't be that good. Whether or not we end up with such a social structure in the end is hard to say, but perhaps we'll all evolve into brains in jars, destroy the planet, discover FTL, or do something strange like decide to deliberately stop forward technological progress because we are all happy with what we have. I think that any short-term change that large, however, can't really happen. Also, whether or not it's "good" or not is defined by those who come after, not before, and we don't know what people will decide to do with or because of it, not really. Predicting anything outside the next hundred years can't be done at all, not really-our rate of technological increase is quite large and is, itself, still increasing.
; As for the proposed expert system: you would need to either be capable of autonomy to the point of having emotional intelligence for humans or your designer would need to literally know every person for which the system must be programmed to the degree necessary to reasonably predict them. If he had said AI, at the time I read it, I'd have been more fine; nowadays, I have a better picture of what a true AI would be/do coupled with a computer science understanding of the subject, and unless we're careful it's not pretty (the links I can provide on this topic would take this thread way off course).
I haven't done kill decision, and I basically agree on Influx. The impression I get is that he hasn't finished finding his voice yet, or that he hasn't managed to get it to his liking. He seems to have good ideas, but seems also to not be the best at fitting them into books (or, perhaps, the editors get to it-we'll neve
r know).
Timothy Zahn. Dragonback is technically YA, but good if you just want to feel good about people in general, and quadrail is fun train mysteries in space. His main genre is Star Wars, as I recall, but I've only read his original works.
And here's something completely off-base, and the only genre I can put it in is, well, itself:
young Wizards by Dianne Duane. The first book starts off typical Urban Fantasy, and looks like it's going to head in the direction of fun adventure for kids. They then end up hopping over to an alternate new york where the buildings and cars are out to kill them, and one of the three "people" (I'm trying very hard not to say too much as doing so spoils the whole first book completely) self-sacrifices to allow them to finish reaffirming the universe's existance by reading from a book that describes it in the speech, essentially a programming language which can describe everyth
ing and, in the process, rewriting the name for the entity responsible for the invention of death (yes, it's not enough for the villain to kill, it also invented the concept of dying and irrevocably wrote it into the universe). This rewriting and an event in book 3 have some strange consequences which are, indeed, explored-if you are a being living outside time, interesting plot lines can develop.
you're probably wondering why I don't call it fantasy. First, wizards are presented as programmers and mathematicians on steroids, have to worry about the energy cost of doing things, have to worry about entropy, etc. Second, by book 3 we've got sentient computers who start pondering if they can apply a patch for entropy, and a stargate system. Common magic includes bringing air along with you, and it's easier to enter a gravity well than to leave one. Wizards study such things as chemistry and physics.
It's intere
sting, and a bit unusual. The further you go, the more towards sci-fi. This is the second thing in this thread so far that I consistently reread-the other is fine structure.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=169226#p169226
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