A.i. Apocalypse

Author: William Hertling

If you are a literary snob, this book will not appeal to you, but if you are a science-fiction nerd who lists their interests as: artificial intelligence, neural networks and machine learning, you will love this book, and in particularly some of the dialogue that has been written with this audience in mind - it's not many novels where you have an artificially intelligent being saying, "All your bases belong to us". This is Hertling's second novel, and a sequel to Avogadro Corp. A brilliant high school student, Leon Tasrev is coerced by a member of the Russian mob (incidentally, who is also his uncle) into developing a new computer virus for the mob's bot-net - the computer army they use to commit their digital crimes. Leon's virus is more successful than he planned it on being, and every computer in the world becomes infected. Imagine our world with that virus - ATMs stop working, iPhones stop working, cash registers stop working, cars stop working - society ceases to function efficiently, resources crash, and humans die in the billions. But the virus keeps growing and evolving into a sophisticated, civilized intelligence. Leon and his friends try to find a way to convince the uber intelligent computers not to kill the human race, or to eliminate the computers entirely. Hertling's characters are enjoyable to follow on this journey, and your favorite characters won't even be one of the people, it will be ELOPe, the email optimization system that is equally cute and creepy. Hertling's description of how the artificial intelligence evolves is fascinating and if you're interested in hard, technical science fiction, this story with its focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning will appeal to you.

Books in Singularity Series (3)

Avogadro Corp

The Last Firewall

The Turing Exception