[joe6pack]

"Daemon" and "Freedom" by Daniel Saurez. Very enjoyable reads, and chock full of not-too-distant futurism. They display an enormous amount of thinking about how social networks and the massively increased availability of data about our lives are changing the ways we interact with each other. Sprinkle in mysteries that play out in both reality and MMORPGs, lots of interesting devices, and a terrifying peek at what a technology-driven global economic meltdown could look like, and you have the basis for these books.

[dmoney]

I liked Daemon. A rogue AI story that doesn't depend on strong AI.

This talk by him was interesting (which was how I found out about the book): http://fora.tv/2008/08/08/Daniel_Suarez_Daemon_Bot-Mediated_...

[arethuza]

Daemon and Freedom are very good. The only problem I had (at it is pretty minor) is that for an AI that keeps asserting that it is just a canned set of production rules (i.e. wait until <something> happens then do <stuff>) it seems to possess a remarkable degree of general intelligence.

[dmoney]

I chalked that up to the billionaire supergenius creator, which also hurts the plausibility a bit.

[arethuza]

Yeah - I think that was the intention of the author. I used to work in AI research so I'm probably being a bit harsh.

[smallhands]

mind sharing why you no longer work in ai research

[arethuza]

It's a long time ago now (late 80s early 90s), but reasons include:

- I hated the politics/game-playing that seem to be a huge component of getting on in academic research

- It was clear to me that we are unlikely to see any fundamental breakthroughs in general AI during my career

- I had been doing work on the Web since '92 and it was clear to me by '95 that this had a much brighter future than "classical" AI

- I co-founded a Web/Java startup in '95