Sunday, March 15, 2020

Five notable books featuring AI

Len Vlahos is the owner of the Tattered Cover in Colorado. He is the author of The Scar Boys, Scar Girl, and Life in a Fishbowl.

His new book is Hard Wired.

At Tor.com, Vlahos tagged "three books where AI doesn’t take over the world, and two where they kind of do," including:
Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill

Sea of Rust is definitely a book where AI take over the world. In fact, the last human crawls out of the sewers and dies on page two. Boom.

Decades later, the robots in Sea of Rust, led by a scavenger name Brittle, are battling a massive, hive-mind artificial intelligence to protect their individual freedom. The bots grapple with moral dilemmas, painful memories of the brutality they unleashed on humans, and what it means to be a living, thinking person. (A person, not a human.) These philosophical musings are encased in an adventure story that reads like a bad-ass android Western.

This is one of the books—along with Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Otherworld (by Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller)—that directly influenced the writing of Hard Wired, my own take on AI. Thanks C. Robert!
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue