Avogadro Corp
David Ryan is the designer of ELOPe, an email language optimization program, that if successful, will make his career. But when the project is suddenly in danger of being canceled, David embeds a hidden directive in the software accidentally creating a runaway artificial intelligence. David and his team are initially thrilled when the project is allocated extra servers and programmers. But excitement turns to fear as the team realizes that they are being manipulated by an A.I. who is redirecting corporate funds, reassigning personnel and arming itself in pursuit of its own agenda.
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What Hacker News says
- Sounds like you are referring to book 1 in a series, the book called "Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer than It Appears" by William Hertling. I read 3-4 of those books, they were entertaining.
- If you have not yet read "Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears," I highly recommend.
- For a really fun exploration of this, read Avogadro Corp by William Hertling.
- So there’s a middling sci-fi novel from maybe a decade ago trying to tell the AI Takeoff story called Avogadro Corp. It’s not exactly Heinlein but it’s a fun little yarn.
The basic premise is that Google pardon me Avogadro Corp is doing NLP email copy-editing, but it takes too many compute resources so in desperation the TL hand wave sets it loose to secure its own budget, and being good at writing convincing emails, well, one thing leads to another.
Now this is very hand-wavy and involves a lot of magical thinking and suspension of disbelief. But that’s ok, it’s a pulpy sci-fi novel for fun.
Now this fictional scenario is dramatically more specific, more detailed, and frankly more believable than anything anyone has linked on this thread.
And I have no issue with folks wanting to LARP this sort of thing in a capital-R Rationalist forum somewhere: it’s a premise that has fascinated sci-fi fans since Asimov wrote his 3 Laws and probably before that.
But when it starts hitting the mainstream press, K Street, freaking out everyday people, and being used to turbocharge fear-driven land-grabs around intellectual property precedent?
Yeah, it’s time to do better than “But what if I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream Was Real man?!?!”
- I didn't mean they get any characteristic by accident or spontaneously or something. I think that's ridiculous and people talking about that are confusing the issues here.
I liked Avogadro Corp. Good book.
It's true that people will be directing these AIs initially but some people are already giving them incredibly broad goals that could be interpreted as "take over". And there are quite a few developers earnestly working on emulating those lifelike characteristics. So even though they are not going to "emerge" science fiction style, self-preservation and reproductive goals are explicitly being built into these systems by some developers.
- https://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-William-Hertling-audiob...
Singularity Series by William Hertling.
It's a few years old but I think it really nailed where AI could go - both in amazing positive ways but also in dark ways as well.
It starts essentially a plugin for gmail that makes email more effective and snowballs into.........no spoilers.
