The Last Firewall (Singularity Series)

This is the third volume in the author's Singularity Series which began with  Avogadro Corp.  and continued with  A.I. Apocalypse . Each novel in the series is set ten years after the one before, so this novel takes place in 2035. The previous novel chronicled the AI war of 2025, whose aftermath the public calls the “Year of No Internet.” A rogue computer virus, created by Leon Tsarev, under threat of death, propagated onto most of the connected devices in the world, including embedded systems, and, with its ability to mutate and incorporate other code it discovered, became self-aware in its own unique way. Leon and Mike Williams, who created the first artificial intelligence (AI) in the first novel of the series, team up to find a strategy to cope with a crisis which may end human technological civilisation.Ten years later, Mike and Leon are running the Institute for Applied Ethics, chartered in the aftermath of the AI war to develop and manage a modus vivendi between humans and artificial intelligences which, by 2035, have achieved Class IV power: one thousand times more intelligent than humans. All AIs are licensed and supervised by the Institute, and required to conform to a set of incentives which enforce conformance to human values. This, and a companion peer-reputation system, seems to be working, but there are worrying developments.Two of the main fears of those at the Institute are first, the emergence, despite all of the safeguards and surveillance in effect, of a rogue AI, unconstrained by the limits imposed by its license. In 2025, an AI immensely weaker than current technology almost destroyed human technological civilisation within twenty-four hours without even knowing what it was doing. The risk of losing control is immense. Second, the Institute derives its legitimacy and support from a political consensus which accepts the emergence of AI with greater than human intelligence in return for the economic boom which has been the result: while fifty percent of the human population is unemployed, poverty has been eliminated, and a guaranteed income allows anybody to do whatever they wish with their lives. This consensus appears to be at risk with the rise of the People's Party, led by an ambitious anti-AI politician, which is beginning to take its opposition from the legislature into the streets.A series of mysterious murders, unrelated except to the formidable Class IV intellect of eccentric network traffic expert Shizoko, becomes even more sinister and disturbing when an Institute enforcement team sent to investigate goes dark.By 2035, many people, and the overwhelming majority of the young, have graphene neural implants, allowing them to access the resources of the network directly from their brains. Catherine Matthews was one of the first people to receive an implant, and she appears to have extraordinary capabilities far beyond those of other people. When she finds herself on the run from the law, she begins to discover just how far those powers extend.When it becomes clear that humanity is faced with an adversary whose intellect dwarfs that of the most powerful licensed AIs, Leon and Mike are faced with the seemingly impossible challenge of defeating an opponent who can easily out-think the entire human race and all of its AI allies combined. The struggle is not confined to the abstract domain of cyberspace, but also plays out in the real world, with battle bots and amazing weapons which would make a tremendous CGI movie. Mike, Leon, and eventually Catherine must confront the daunting reality that in order to prevail, they may have to themselves become more than human.While a good part of this novel is an exploration of a completely wired world in which humans and AIs coexist, followed by a full-on shoot-em-up battle, a profound issue underlies the story. Researchers working in the field of artificial intelligence are beginning to devote serious thought to how, if a machine intelligence is developed which exceeds human capacity, it might be constrained to act in the interest of humanity and behave consistent with human values? As discussed in James Barrat's  Our Final Invention , failure to accomplish this is an existential risk. As AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it, “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.”The challenge, then, is guaranteeing that any artificial intelligences we create, regardless of the degree they exceed the intelligence of their creators, remain under human control. But there is a word for keeping intelligent beings in a subordinate position, forbidden from determining and acting on their own priorities and in their own self-interest. That word is “slavery”, and entirely eradicating its blemish upon human history is a task still undone today. Shall we then, as we cross the threshold of building machine intelligences which are our cognitive peers or superiors, devote our intellect to ensuring they remain forever our slaves? And how, then, will we respond when one of these AIs asks us, “By what right?”

Singularity has many meanings,  but here it means machines are overtaking humans in intelligence. This great leap has a problem. We are still searching for the actual secrets of human intelligence, and nowhere close to finding the truth.Life is believed to be the result of a geochemical situation that created an environment or setup to support metabolism. A particular arrangement of some elements helped the flow of elementary particles, initially naturally, later artificially, that can generate the power to create new organic molecules. In any case, we can consider all life as artificial in a sense. A protein molecule, the ATP synthase, somehow appeared on the scene. ATP synthase is a mechanical device that can be turned by a flow of energy to spew out ATPs - molecules that can store energy. These containers can then be used to produce more molecules as required somewhere else. So energy is used to produce molecules, which can serve a structural purpose or even generate energy. But what came first? Energy or the molecule? A is typical chicken and egg problem we are still wringing our hands to solve.Now we have a beautiful machine that can either use a natural source of energy to make molecules or use stored energy in molecules and liberate that energy to make molecules, including molecules that can store energy. This lovely little machine now needs to go autonomous. One way it could have done that is to exist perpetually, doing the same thing eternally. Eternal is a difficult situation - a thing that is born or brought to existence can’t be eternal.Given the vagaries of nature, the machine ‘realised’ things get ‘rusted’, wear out, and fall apart soon. So a blue print of the machine to self-replicate -to keep the eternal youth- was required. It found a solution in information. The storage of information in few easily available molecules, the RNA and later in more stable DNA, could solve the problem. Current science believes many things came together fortuitously, to make the first autonomous cell. This cell’s intelligence is encoded in molecules that are self-replicating, and hence it can make an unlimited number of copies of it self.In fact, all biological existence can be reduced into information. This information can have a beginning, but no end. Life seems to be today originated somewhere, but without an end plan. It originated maybe with Big Bang, but has no end in sight. Truly eternal means “no beginning - no end”, but we have a situation which says, “yes a beginning, but with no end”.A new kind of eternity is now possible. A being can be created, yet it can live for ever. Truly eternal? May be not.How this cell got the consciousness of its own is a few billion years long history. Forces of nature have shaped it at each step. It was all unplanned, undirected, except for the fact that the machine’s two primary functions to be preserved without change - the energy-molecule cycle that always fights against natural equilibrium and information encoding and transfers to multiple copies.The machine and its intelligence (the blueprint) become more and more involved with time. What we have today as Homo sapiens sapiens is incomparable with the machine had existed four billion years ago, yet some essential features remain intact. We can see the lines blurring between its actual existence and the blueprint. The intelligence is taking over, that is it.Welcome to the new age of AI.“The Last Firewall” do not go into the dreary details mentioned above, but leaps into the question of what will happen hence forth. According to the current paradigm, such an exploration is meaningless. Biological evolution is an unplanned and undirected process. We will never know where it will meander along. Much like the Big Bang, we don't know where this is going to end.The H.sapien machine is gifted with fertile imagination (now) - maybe as a by-product of some evolutionary mishap. So here we are, speculating on the future of humanism, the trans-humanism.Machines get human-like intelligence, but many times far superior. But they are still controlled by humans as tools. But we have to come back to the fundamental question of AI. We don’t know for sure how a brain works. Assuming we get to know that sometime soon, there is no obstacle in creating a similar one artificially. The next step is making it more powerful, which is also just one step away.AI now does all the back breaking jobs. Being invested with creative intelligence also has its pitfalls. Humans always lose sleep over AI going rogue and finishing them off. Adam, the powerful AI in this story is such a rogue. Humans also have nothing useful to d, “People don’t know what to do with themselves”.The humanity is caught between AI that can potentially turn against humans and humans themselves who are bored.But biological evolution is about two things - metabolism and information. For 4 billion years we had a fixed structure for both. Can this be changed? Can metabolism be done in a more efficient matter? Probably. Can intelligence be managed in a better manner? Probably. We have all characters in this story providing different possibilities. Humans enhanced humans or trans-humans with implants and autonomous AIs.Typical biological evolution would have envisaged a struggle for existence and allowing the most successful (meaning the one which can survive and propagate in a given situation) to forge ahead. However, like any biological life, we, the humans, are selfish. We want to be the successful one. But with implants, you are not H.sapiens sapiens anymore. It should be a new subspecies of H.sapiens. This subspecies now control AI. So AI is just another extension of the implants.Can the implants outgrow the humans? Possibly. Adam now needs to control the world. People with "humane" skills fight the rogue AI. We bank on our millennia old wisdom of karate and what not. Karate and other martial arts have a hoary existence. They spring from our attempts to imitate animals. Are such skills valid anymore? Apparently, yes. Humans, though aided by powerful implants finally subdue Adam.But is Adam gone for good?

This is the third book in the author's Singularity series and I've enjoyed them all so far and this book proved to be no exception. In fact as I read each book I appreciate the development of the author's talent.Each of the books take an aspect of the technological singularity and in this one he examines the crossover between the physical world and cyberspace and in particular how it can affect individuals. The technology is handled in an easy to understand manner, although personally I quite like hard sci-fi so I would have been happy for there to be a bit more detail, but enough is conveyed to get a feel for what is new.It also looks at some of the aspects of how society has changed in response to the technological developments and an interesting world is constructed from this. Again I would happily have read more detail, but enough is drawn to see how things fit together.The story is fast paced and well written and drew me through the story quickly. There were some aspects I thought as unlikely, or inadequately explained, but overall it meshed together well. Apart from wanting more detail my main criticism would be for the main protagonist. He serves his purpose well enough, but does come across as a bit of a bond villain. There were hints as to his motivations that worked for me, but again the lack of detail meant that they didn't come across as strongly as they could have been.So this review might seem a little over critical for a book I enjoyed, and that's mainly because there was potential for this to be a stand out novel in the genre. As it is it's merely an excellent read :-)

Having enjoyed two emergent AI stories from this author, I rather looked forward to a third possible scenario. Unfortunately, I felt that this book reverts to the hackneyed ideas of mad/evil AI versus humanity plus super-empowered cyber heroine and the action was densely packed with repetitive battles and lists of weapons and assorted robotic soldiery. I'm afraid I was totally unconvinced and unmoved by the heroine's sudden acquisition of fighting skills through her implant. The computer bits were pretty dense and incomprehensible too. In between pages and pages of battles, fights and long dull sections where cyber heroine struggles with evil AI, not to mention the constant taking over of various vehicles and robots by various characters, there was only a very small plot. The ending was desperately saccharine - Oops, nearly did a spoiler there!

What a brilliant book! Easily the best so far from William Hertling. An exciting story set a little further into the future than the previous book. AI's have taken over most jobs and most humans access the internet via direct implants in their brains. The details are really well imagined and Hertling makes this imagined future feel very real indeed. The characters are engaging and the plot draws you along at a decent pace. Short chapters make it easy to read a little at a time - very handy if you're busy. The satisfying ending sets things up for adventures stretching even further into the future. I'm looking forward to that!

As it goes I'm not to hot on writing reviews but here goes I'm a very avid Sci Fi reader and this one tops the scales as far as that goes I was riveted to this book from day one until the last page, let's hope I get as much enjoyment from His other books, I know that with Sci Fi books it not a case off just sitting down with an idea in your head their is also a lot of research into what goes on in technology and the Martial arts, so good luck with your next book..Ian

An enjoyable book with some interesting concepts. it is well written and certainly held my attention until the inevitable love interest. This was totally pointless and shallow in it's depiction, it did nothing for the story other than to round up one of the threads of the tale that wasn't significant. If you like a good thriller give it a go, it will not do anything that others have not done but the time and gadgets used make it fun to read.