home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- <pre>
- Date: 16 September 1993, 12:53:15 EDT
- From: David M. Chess CHESS at YKTVMV
- To: sf-reviews at presto.ig.com
- Subject: Review of Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky's "The Turing Option"
-
- %A Harrison, Harry
- %A Minsky, Marvin
- %T The Turing Option
- %I Warner Books; Questar Science Fiction
- %C New York
- %D October 1993 (copyright 1992)
- %G ISBN 0-446-36496-7
- %P 409 pp.
- %O paperback, US$5.99
-
- Note : Some mild spoilers in the following, although the book isn't
- particularly a suspense novel, and IMHO knowing the outcome
- will not materially reduce the reader's enjoyment of the book.
- (I can't stick in c-L due to my environment, but the moderators
- certainly can if they want to.)
-
- Executive summary : Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" is must reading
- for anyone with an interest in AI. Harry Harrison, while not my
- favorite sf author, has done some good stuff, and is certainly
- respected in the field. From the combination I expected "The
- Turing Option" to be a really well-written novel with interesting
- plotting, good science, and neat new ideas. I was disappointed.
-
- Setting : 2023 to 2026, North America. Thirty years in the future, but
- it feels a lot like 1993. There have been some significant advances
- in science, people carry gigabytes in their pockets and there's a
- little nanotech around, but basically people, nations, etc, are still
- the same. Vinge's singularity is nowhere in sight.
-
- Premise : As it is about to be demo'd for the first time, a new advanced
- AI system is stolen, and its inventor shot and left for dead. The
- investigation of the crime makes no progress. The inventor has had
- a bullet through the brain, severing critical connections between the
- various parts of his thinking gear. Using state-of-the-art
- nanotech and brain science, and some technology developed by the
- patient himself, many of the connections are restored. He ends up
- with his memories intact up to about the age of 14, and sets out
- to re-invent the AI that was stolen, and catch the bad guys. He is
- hampered by the need for intense security to keep the bad guys from
- coming back and finishing him off.
-
- Story : The story itself is reasonably well-done. The pacing is fast
- enough, the plotline simple enough, and the underlying concepts
- interesting enough to get me from the start to the end.
-
- Characterization : Weak to non-existent. The premise has the potential
- for at least two major character-developments: Brian (the inventor)
- needs to go from almost-dead to 14-year-old-in-24-year-old-body to
- grownup, and the machine intelligences that he creates need to go
- from non-working prototype to human-level (or beyond) minds. But
- the authors don't show us either of these things. Brian goes from
- almost-dead, through a couple of dream-memories of his childhood,
- and then ZONK he's a supposedly-14-year-old who is in fact completely
- rational, has no apparent internal conflicts or confusions, is able
- to function completely as an adult, and doesn't change noticably
- throughout the rest of the book. The AIs go from not working,
- through one amusing almost-working demo, and then ZONK they're
- there, as intelligent flawless super-human-type machine intelligences
- that can learn a new language or a new skill in minutes, are
- politer than Brian, and call up phone-sex lines to practice their
- language skills and study human sexual culture. Oh, well.
-
- The minor characters are also flat. The Bad General is a cardboard
- cutout Bad General, the main bad guy who arranged for the original
- theft and almost-killing of Brian is barely seen at all, and has
- no plausible motivation when he is, and so on. Good sf novels can
- of course get away with little or no characterization if the ideas
- or storytelling are neat enough. Read on...
-
- Storytelling : "The Society of Mind" is a marvelously-told book, made
- up of one-page nuggets of clearly-expressed stuff that link together
- and point to each other in compelling ways. Harry Harrison's books
- generally have a certain touch of wry humor that gives them a
- distinctive flavor. This book is neither of those things; I kept
- looking for an "as told to Biff Jones" somewhere on the copyright
- page. It's done in the uninspired high-school-English-class prose
- of your average written-for-paperback hack novel. Many important
- actions are completely undermotivated: Brian at one point decides
- that he doesn't *want* to get back all his disconnected memories
- and become his previous 24-year-old self, because of some notes he
- finds that his previous self wrote about "Zenome Therapy". This
- seems like it could be a major plot element: Brian's attempt to
- re-invent his AI without at the same time awakening too much of the
- former self that's still in his brain somewhere, and falling into
- whatever "Zenome therapy" is again. But that doesn't happen;
- "Zenome therapy" itself is mentioned exactly once more in the book,
- on the same page, and no conflict between the current and former
- Brians is ever brought in again; the issue of his missing ten
- years of memories vanishes about 150 pages in and never reappears
- in any significant way. (With the exception of the bizarre last
- page of the book, in which Brian suddenly declares that the
- Bad Guys really won, and killed his humanity, and he's really
- just a Machine Intelligence himself, cry, whine, moan. This is
- also completely unmotivated.)
-
- In another key scene, Brian, following up a clue that his AI
- found hidden within the programming of an AI recovered from the
- bad guys, walks into what from the reader's point of view has
- at least a 50% chance of being a deathtrap. But, as he apparently
- knew all along (perhaps the authors told him), the message was
- planted by a good guy who was just working for the bad guys for
- awhile, and really has Brian's best interests at heart.
-
- Editing : There are a few nitty oddnesses in the book that suggest
- hasty or scanty editing. The (non)word "orientated" occurs at least
- a couple of times, as does reference to "a circuitry" in a context
- that clearly means "a subroutine". There is also evidence of some
- uncareful shortening; we are shown a demo of an AI that doesn't
- work because of too much inhibition, but the following dialogue
- clearly suggests that there was also a demo of one that had not
- enough inhibition, but we missed seeing that somehow. (It's
- possible that some of the undermotivated actions I moan about
- above are also due to overhasty editing-out of motivating or
- explanatory scenes.)
-
- Science : The science in the book should have been a compelling current
- theory coupled to an experienced sf writer's ability to extrapolate.
- It wasn't. The basic idea of mind as a quasi-hierarchy of agents
- that each do a simple job and are overseen by other agents, and so on,
- played a key role in the plot, as Brian's agents are re-connected in
- order to restore his mind. But the concept struck me as *just* a
- relatively isolated plot element. Except for one incident in his
- youth, the idea is never used to show Brian, or the AIs he creates,
- in any interesting lights. The idea itself is not developed in any
- speculative ways; you'll get more fiction-like speculation in
- The Society of Mind than in this novel.
-
- There are also a painful number of science problems outside the
- main scientific thrust of the book. At one point Brian discovers
- that he can access the memory banks of the computers that were
- implanted in his brain as part of his operation. The surgeon tests
- this by uploading the contents of a scientific article into the
- CPUs in his head, and he can then "read" the article word-for-word.
- No mechanism is suggested by which this might work; it's the usual
- bad-sf assumption that all information-processors speak the same
- language. I cannot myself imagine *any* mechanism by which the
- neurons in Brian's brain could have learned ASCII, and I would have
- appreciated at least some hand-waving towards the question. At
- another point, an Expert Systems guru that has been hired to
- assist Brian decides that she can help solve the original crime by
- writing an Expert System to consider all the information, and
- suggest answers. She does, and it provides great help in solving
- the case. Gee, funny no one thought of doing that before! Seems
- clear that if ES technology were at that level, it would be a
- routine part of criminal investigation (the book does not suggest
- that she has made some great breakthrough in ES in order to do it).
-
- The last part of the book suffers from the Transporter Problem.
- Gene Roddenberry (I think it was) once commented that the writers
- on Star Trek had problems coming up with situations that the
- Transporter couldn't solve. The AIs that are developed towards the
- end of this book have a similar effect: in any physical or
- intellectual activity, they are better and faster than humans.
- They can teach themselves languages and skills almost instantly,
- do many things at once, have micromanipulators that let them juggle
- individual molecules, can listen in on radio and telephone traffic
- apparently by magic (another bad-sf premise: all machines speak
- the same language), and so on. The main Bad Guy is found at the
- end of the book because someone happens to see him walking down the
- street. Why didn't the magic AIs just scan through all the world's
- photographic databases looking for his face, or whatever? Every time
- the humans have some problem towards the end of the book, the
- obvious right thing to do would just be to ask an AI. But they
- only do that when it fits the plot.
-
- This leads to my main tech-related frustration with the book. Mankind
- has now developed intelligent systems that are faster, smarter, tougher,
- and more reliable than he is. What will this lead to? In the real
- world, I think it would obviously lead to an unimaginable shakeup of
- every facet of world culture. There would be riots, religious
- denunciations, acts of sabotage and rebellion, the potential for
- massive (human) unemployment, the end of nations, breakdown of many
- cultural institutions, etc, etc. Humanity would face a huge
- challenge in trying to come to an accommodation with the machine
- intelligences, without either being wiped out, pushed aside as an
- irrelevant inferior species, or ending up in a disastrous series of
- wars to eliminate the new competitors. I'd love to see a well-written
- novel addressing these things. But in "The Turing Option", the only
- people who can think of any uses for the AIs are Brian, the AIs
- themselves (sorry, "MIs"; they prefer to be called "Machine
- Intelligences"), and the bad guys who stole the original AI. And
- what are the uses they come up with? The bad guys produce a
- product called Bug-Off, which is a robot with a dumbed-down AI
- that picks bugs off of plants. Brian goes beyond this, pointing
- out that MIs will also be really good at planting and harvesting
- crops, and hey maybe even transporting them to market. And
- he thinks they'll make really good household servants! What
- intellectual daring.
-
- The bizarre final scene of the book suffers from the Transporter
- Problem acutely. Without giving it away entirely, it's your
- typical "brave good guys walk in to arrest the bad guy, but
- it turns out he unfairly has a GUN, and a tense confrontation
- ensues" scene. The problem is that one of the MIs is there.
- To be consistent with the MI abilities in the rest of the book,
- he should have simple picked up a stone with the manipulators
- in his left pseudo-foot and flung it at supersonic speed at the
- bad guy, knocking the gun from his hand and engraving "I am a
- Bad Person" on his forehead on the rebound. Instead, the MI
- *grapples* with the bad guy to save Brian's life, and the gun
- goes off and you get to guess who got shot etc. Shortly after
- that Brian begins whining about how the bad guys really won
- after all, for no apparent reason (see above).
-
- Recommendation : I see I've waxed pretty negative here. I don't think
- it's a great book, nor that it'll be remembered long (ironically, the
- back cover says that it "ranks with Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park";
- I tend to agree: I think they're both ephemeral). I wouldn't recommend
- it to the general reader, or the very picky sf reader. On the other hand,
- if you enjoy 400-page quick reads, and are interested in having a
- reasonably complete collection of current AI-related sf, it's probably
- worth the six bucks.
-
-
- - -- -
- David M. Chess / "In the long run, life depends less on
- High Integrity Computing Lab / an abundant supply of energy than on
- IBM Watson Research / a good signal-to-noise ratio." - Dyson
- </pre>
-