(2014-04-22) Hon Episode Sixty Four Suarez Computer Says No Snow Crashing

Dan Hon: Episode Sixty Four: Computer Says No, Snow Crashing. Computer Says No: I've started on Daniel Suarez's books[1], which I've been meaning to get around to for a while ever since seeing Daemon come out in 2006

Here's some of the themes in the Daemon/Freedom duology that I found interesting:

Computers control everything these days

These days, knowledge of SCADA has spread outside of its initial domain, and Stuxnet[2], discovered a mere three years later, is probably the best example of a multi-vector, doggedly single-minded example of software reaching out and having a defined offensive physical effect.

Narrow AI Is Sufficiently Complicated

Suarez gets a lot better at describing exactly what Daemon is - at the start of the book, Daemon is the equivalent of a Sufficiently Advanced If This Then That Recipe

The bit about using the machinery of an MMORPG for command-and-control of a network, or as a Bond-villain-esque backdoor is a bit genius

Perhaps the hardest to stomach part of the Daemon is its semantic analysis of the news. There's reference to the mechanical how of it - distributed RSS newsreaders and scrapers scanning for keywords - but what we don't see any of in the book are false positives

did he define activation keywords for each and every single triggering event that the Daemon required?

The Invisible

This idea of a data shadow, a clickstream plume that is emitted as a result of your activity and never really dissipates, has been gaining a lot of steam lately

Follow the instructions to be part of a team

There's a whole set of examples of people blindly following instructions (and the variant, of people choosing to follow opaque instructions) in Daemon.

There's a side-alley that I feel Suarez could've gone through here: essentially, he's talking about control and the way in which we can be influenced without our executive function necessarily catching on quick enough.

The key word here I think is choreography, and that's perhaps a clearer way to think about what's being described

Anyway, if you love that sort of stuff you really should've read Bruce Sterling's Maneki Neko[3] by now.

At least from the beginning third of Freedom, it's good to see the more nuanced (in parts - it's still a screed against capitalism, I think, but also firmly planted in the Californian Ideology of technology saving the day) plot. It's an interesting perspective to see how widespread AR might develop from a gaming-first community.