Burn-In

P.W. Singer and August Cole

FBI Agent Keegan from the Washington DC field office is a former special ops marine and all around bad-ass. Part of her expertise in the marines was bot-wrangler. As we are all increasingly aware, the wrong prompt into your AI will result in gibberish. And when the prompts to your war-bot have life or death consequences, you get good at it. So as an agent, Keegan is assigned a Tactical Autonomous Mobility System (TAMS), a new generation bi-pedal bot with sensors galore and a still learning neural architecture. Her assignment is to train it. In the real world she is also in the midst of an investigation of several anomalous computer events, and a political climate of basically "us vs them" in terms of humans/bots. What could possibly go wrong. An engaging story that gets the pacing right and has a few cut-outs where Keegan gets to geek out with the TAMS handler about the philosophy of sentience and human/bot interactions. Short answer: Human/bot interactions are complex.

4 stars (out of 4)