Agency
"Verity Jane, gifted app-whisperer, has been out of work since her exit from a brief but problematic relationship with a Silicon Valley billionaire. Then she signs the wordy NDA of a dodgy San Francisco start-up, becoming the beta tester for their latest product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. "Eunice," the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, soon manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and an unnervingly canny grasp of combat strategy. Verity, realizing that her cryptic new employers don't yet know this, instinctively decides that it's best they don't. Meanwhile, a century ahead, in London, in a different timeline entirely, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. His employer, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice have become her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice can't: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner. And something else too: the roles they both may play in it"
Stats for nerds
13recommend
34mentions
29people
2019–2026years
41% recommend44% neutral15% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Which books did you read at least twice? Please give author, title, and how often you have read it.
For me the (probably incomplete list) is:
Connie Willis: Doomsday Book (three times)
Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon, Anathem, Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World (twice or three times)
Frank Herbert: Dune (three times)
Tolkien: Lord of the Rings (three times)
Stephen King: Salem's Lot, The Shining, It (three times each)
Stephen King & Peter Straub: The Talisman (twice)
Vernor Vinge: A Deepness in the Sky, A Fire Upon The Deep, Rainbow's End (each twice)
Tracy Kidder: The Soul of a New Machine (twice)
Larry McMurtry: Lonesome Dove (twice)
Ross Thomas: Chinaman's Chance (twice)
William Gibson: Neuromancer, The Peripheral, Agency (each twice)
- You might be interested in William Gibson's Jackpot triloy - The Peripheral and Agency.
- Don’t think I read the sequels. I have read other Gibson novels (Pattern Recognition, Agency, The Peripheral, and others I can’t think of right now) and liked them.
- AI is, or will very soon be, superior to all human knowledge workers. In the spirit of capitalism, lowest cost/highest profit trumps all. With the US geriatric governance and speed of change, a lot of people will be hit by under/unemployment. All this termult happening, meanwhile the AI arms race is going on. Nation states hacking eachother using AI. Then you have the AI itself trying to escape the box…want a preview of this? Listen to “Agency” audiobook on Audible. I think it’s by Stephenson or Gibson. It’s surely going to be a wild decade before us.
- Anything by Neal Stephenson. (Except Fall, maybe.) Cryptonomicron is my fav modern novel.
Project Hail Mary. The Martian. Artemis.
Expanse series.
William Gibson,s stuff. Loved Peripheral, and it's sequel Agency.
- Yes. And it's fiction. We might as well discuss Excession, Agency, Diaspora (Banks, Gibson and Egan respectively) all of whom have more interesting and insightful things to say about humanity, game theory and ... seriously, as a life long (and I am OLD) science fiction fan, the fawning over The Remembrance of Earth's past is just silly. The concept of "suspicion". Might I suggest that people read Thomas Schelling's seminal work The Strategy of Conflict to begin with since if you want to understand concepts like brinksmanship and the push and pull of actual inter-civilization (or society or nation state) conflicts then you might want to start there and not with fiction riddled with silly concepts, weird misogyny and stuff that seems to be right out of the discarded parts of a Gregory Benford trilogy. I mean seriously.
But ok. Let's dig into this
"We can apply this concept of suspicion to the phenomenon in the field of modern artificial intelligence research. In AI research, some researchers believe that humans should pause the development of AI technology because of the potential unforeseeable risks it may bring."
An analogy would be that some of the scientists involved with the Manhattan project (see Szilárd petition) attempted to file an official protest against the use of nuclear weapons against civilian population and arguing that the weapons constructed were too dangerous to be a part of an arms race and should be placed under an international control body.
"However, another group of researchers believe that we should not stop because we cannot be certain whether those who are trying to catch up with us will use the advancement of AI technology as a hidden weapon."
Researchers are not decision makers in this or any other scenario. AI technology as a weapon? Sure but unless you are Bombs Away LeMay circa 1961 this really isn't a winnable or even useful use case. We're still in a blue sky phase. The fun thing about nuclear weapons is that if any nation feels that another is pulling too far ahead they can be used as a way to push for bi/multilateral discussions and eventually treaties limiting the production and/or deployment of weapons that risk of increasing tensions/lethality and so on . (see SALT I/II and START etc)
"This suspicion leads to a chain reaction, where people continue to worry about each other's motives and abilities, making it difficult for all parties to establish trust. Therefore, although there are good intentions, such proposals are unlikely to be implemented."
Again... read Schelling... this is just nonsense.
