Most doomsday stories depend on a strong AI to destroy civilization, like Skynet or Eagle Eye, but Daniel Suarez’s book Daemon proposes the terrifying scenario that the human race could be trapped by narrow distributed AI. Far simpler computer programs that don’t embody consciousness but are programmed to respond to events by triggering voice synthesized phone calls, network take-overs, asynchronously coordinated manufacturing, and so forth. Impossible to shut down, and self-sustaining like current viruses and trojan horses, these bots are triggered by the obituary of Matthew Sobol to enact his master plan for a new world order by dismantling our current civilization. Sobol was a ultra-rich game designer who died from brain cancer, and the AI in his games succeeded not by anticipating the players but by manipulating them, and this is the key point in why his Daemon succeeds.

I couldn’t stop reading this book, and was a little disappointed that it ended on a cliffhanger, but now that I found out the sequel Freedom is underway I can’t wait to see what happens!
While this book is a thrill ride that is going to make a fantastic movie, it also made me re-evaluate where technology is taking us and what it’s weak points are. IT security experts haven’t dismissed the scenario in the book out of hand, which just goes to show how solid our infastructure is right now. Be afraid. We’re all connected…and there is no escape…

Preview chapters available on thedaemon.com.

Daniel Suarez presentation on how bots control our lives right now at FORA.tv (video).

But the comedy runs out near the end, where the novel gets dark and tense as you see just how dangerous Rem’s accident proneness can be to other people, and the finale of the book will leave you gaping in disbelief as you try to separate fact from fiction.

You get taken on a rollercoaster ride of emotions as you empathise with the characters, and the ending will take you by surprise instead of leaving you wanting.

Definitely one of the better novels I’ve read recently, and that means a lot coming from a science fiction nut like myself. My only complaint is that some pieces of dialogue run together because you lose track of who’s speaking.

Find the best price at book.co.za.

Backcover blurb: A war correspondent sets out from Amsterdam to South Africa to piece together the fragmented history of Ace and Rem, two brothers from South Africa. Their bizarre and disturbing scrapbook recounts a suspenseful tale of trauma and heartbreak that crosses two continents and leaves a trail of shattered lives in its wake. Six fang marks and a Tetanus Shot is a superb, multi-layered novel that investigates the eviscerating effect that intense trauma can have on a young boy’s mind.

Author Richard de Nooy’s blog.

This fundamental truth is right at the beginning of Denise Shekerjian’s Uncommon Genius – How Great Ideas are Born, just to remind us that there is no shortcut to creativity. The book is a guided tour of the creative impulse, based on interviews with forty winners of the coveted MacArthur Award; an award that could see you living out your years comfortably with a fat paycheck each month, if you have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in your creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.

Even though there is no easy way to being creative, it is comforting to know that everyone else is struggling with the same difficulties.Book summary:

1. Find your talent and stick with it.
2. Don’t be afraid of risk. You may fail, but use it as a learning opportunity.
3. Stay loose in the beginning, so you can explore all solutions instead of committing to the first one that may be wrong. Quick solutions hardly ever work.
4. Get to know yourself; understand your needs and the specific conditions you favour.
5. Don’t worry about money, just focus on your creative work and the money will follow, or you’ll find a way to get along without it (and hopefully you’ll win a MacArthur Award).
6. Learn to communicate, because a creative act depends on the reciever just as much as the sender.
7. Respect your culture, because it will be the ultimate judge of your work. (Update: Some people missed the your here. Your culture means your targeted audience, the culture you’re a part of, not necessarily your entire country’s superficial pop-culture. If your work doesn’t appeal to a sub-culture or at least an individual, what’s the point?)
8. Don’t delay. You can spend a lifetime learning from books without having anything to show for it when you die. Rather spend your time learning by doing, even if your work is at first amateurish you’ll have something to show for your time.
9. You need vision. Without a broad, long-term vision you’ll find obstacles much harder to overcome and failures more difficult to justify. If you focus on the short-term exclusively you’ll get bogged down in the details, and forget why you wanted to spend your life this way in the first place.
10. Change your perspective often. There are thousands of books and websites on imagination techniques such as visualisation, metaphorical thinking, hypothetical questioning, and right-brain thinking. Pick one at random and try it when you’re stuck.
11. Travel more. We get stuck in routine and habit, which helps us brush our teeth in two minutes instead of stabbing ourselves in the eye when we have to re-learn the technique each morning, but too much routine leads to habituation, where you stop noticing the details of the world around you. So get out, travel to a new city where everything is strange, and you’ll be forced to notice the details again.
12. Sustaining concentration and drive. This is a personal thing. Some of us manage by focusing on the imagined feeling of crossing that finish line, others just enjoy the creative process for it’s own sake. Try both and see what fits. Drive shouldn’t be mistaken for a rigid march to the end, sometimes you do need to change direction.
13. Encourage luck by keeping your eyes and mind open for opportunities others miss; by following your curiousity round a few blind-corners, and by turning your work into play.
14. Finding the balance between instinct and judgement. You should be able to follow your instinct in the face of harsh criticism from others, but you have to listen to your own judgement of when you’ve taken a wrong turn.
15. Despair and isolation, madness and meanness.The dark side of creativity. Most geniuses are seen as nutters or depressives, but it is not a prerequisite. Creativity necessarily makes you deviate from the main-stream, which may lead to isolation if you’re not good at handling criticism or get upset when you’re misunderstood. People tend to equate you with your work, so don’t take everything as a personal attack even when it sounds like one.
16. Building resiliency, or how to keep going. Maintain a variety of projects to switch between when you’re sick of one; choose your friends wisely; embrace your errors and disappointments to see what you can learn; when a problem seems intractable, leave it, come back to it, leave it again, and again return; invest yourself in the vision, focusing not just on the goal but on the process; be accepting of the rhythms of pleasure and pain; retain a plasticity and curiosity about the potential of your field; learn to see the advantage in a hardship; develop a philosophy that allows you to accept defeat on the same terms as you would welcome a victory; make an effort to know yourself and determine what works for you.
17. For the love of it. The easiest way to encourage creativity. Do it for love. Love of the work, the finished product, the people.

Related:

• 14 things you can learn from the Google story
• Milton Glaser’s 10 things I have learned
• School system needs revolution not evolution
• Thinking with a damaged brain
• Keeping your balance
• Hugh MacLeod’s How to be creative

1. Connections – human, computer, biology – are everything. Life = networks.
2. Never compromise your ideals because someone said it’s impossible, stupid, or a waste of time.
3. Do focus on changing the world, don’t focus on the money. If you provide value, the money will come.
4. Have a healthy disregard for the impossible. If someone hasn’t done it yet, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
5. Money is a problem, not a solution. Money cannot solve your problems, but your solutions can solve the money problem.
6. Value creativity, not money. View creativity as your company’s true bottom-line, or your company will stop growing and die.
7. Go against the grain. Don’t believe in other people’s visions for you, believe in your own.
8. Speed is more important than looking good. A shiny, beautiful car isn’t impressive when it gets overtaken by an old jalopy; the same applies to software.
9. Organic growth is best. Only grow as fast as you need to, don’t waste money on advertising a product you won’t want your mom to use.
10. Focus on users above all else, e.g. don’t do something that might annoy your users just to make more money, they won’t forget.
11. Never betray users’ trust, or anyone else’s.
12. Spend 20% of your time on blue-sky ideas without worrying about how they will make a profit. If it might change the world for the better, it needs to be done, even if it can’t make money.
13. Don’t make enemies of your competitors to stay driven. Be driven by your own values and mission.
14. Beat your own path through the wilderness.

These are the flashes of insight I had while reading The Google Story, please add your own in the comments.

Open your eyes/How to read for yourself

Reading and art should never be revered to the point of idolisation, as we then falsely perceive the things written about to be the only things of beauty in our surroundings. We should learn to see our surroundings with the master’s eyes, rather than trying to see the master’s surroundings with our own eyes. Use a master’s work to learn a new way of seeing to expand your abilities, instead of restricting yourself to the tiny fragment of human experience which the master artist has lived through.

On friendship

Friendship tends to be over-rated. A cynical and perhaps truthful view to take is that friendship is just a warm feeling of affection which may be reciprocated, and nothing more should be expected to avoid disappointment. The pursuit of affection and the pursuit of truth should be seperated. Friendship allows for affection, but you need to split your personality for it to work. You cannot be brutally honest with a friend, but in placing your thoughts on paper or a painting you can be perfectly truthful. Thus both pursuits can be achieved without intefering with one another.

On appreciating life

If your death was guaranteed in a day, week, or year; how would your priorities change? Shouldn’t they be changed now rather than procrastinating till you’re dead? How would those people who were killed by the tsunami have lived differently if they knew? Okay, they probably would’ve given the beach a miss, but you get the point.

On taking your time

If you rush through life you’ll miss out on the richness which seemingly mundane objects and events have to offer. This applies even more in our current culture of get-things-done-faster-or-you’re-just-a-lazy-sod.

How not to point fingers

When suffering, don’t blame something or someone else and give up; just accept that shit happens and move on.

Expressing yourself

Avoid clichés in expression. Though they may be tried and true, they are also old and worn. Rather be original at the risk of ridicule or rejection.

[tags]proust, books, philosophy, psychology, life[/tags]