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)

Machinehood

S.B. Divya

Set in the mid-century future where machine technology has advanced to the point where most things are operated by Weak AI (WAI), indicating intelligence but not self-awareness. Individual privacy is nearly non-existent, individuals all carry their own "swarm" of video transmitting bots/drones, everyone has an electronic tip-jar where their public feeds can earn micropayments from viewers. Think 'likes' with cash attached. Since everything is public and recorded, murder and crime is almost non-existent. Nano-meds are prevalent and people (in order to keep up with the bot workforce) regularly take flow (to enhance neural function) or zips (to enhance muscle function). Our protagonist (Welga Ramirez) is a former special forces, now private security lives on these zips (has a genetic allergy to flow) and is outstanding at her job. But when a terrorist organization calling itself "The Machinehood" actually murders several biotech billionaires, calling for equitable treatment of all AI, Welga finds herself in the middle of the investigation. Great story/plot line and a strong treatment of the questions related to machine/human interaction that will necessarily be rising in our world in the next 20 years. Well done and worth the read.

4 stars (out of 4)