Note: This book review is dedicated to the late John P. Messmer: a voracious reader, outstanding engineer, and stand-up guy with an enormous heart. Paying homage to Messmer’s book-a-day reading habit, this reviewer read Virtual Vengeance in a day. It was refreshing to read words on paper, instead of a screen, and to become engrossed in a story that is more relevant today than when it was published.
Must-Read Science Fiction
In 2014, Virtual Vengeance would have been categorized as science fiction as its futuristic concepts were mostly known to technologists and visionaries. Given the progression of technology in the past decade, it is now simply good fiction.
It is an entertaining must-read for understanding how today’s AI developments and the blurring of the human-machine divide will increasingly change life as we know it.
In this gripping mystery, set sometime in the future, computers have the upper hand over the populace. The villains cloak the manipulations of their algorithms to an unsuspecting public through devices perceived as benefitting society.
Much like today’s world where applications, like turn-by-turn directions, elevate everyone into orienting geniuses, the ever-present superintelligence has removed life’s friction.1 The downside is that struggle is often the source of creativity and discovery.
As reported in last month’s Viodi View and echoed by Virtual Vengeance, embracing inconvenience may be the key to a more meaningful life.2 The characters in the book who have been taught solely by computers don’t have the social skills that come from interacting with human teachers and fellow students.
It foreshadows many of today’s political issues at the top of the news or, more appropriately, of the social media feed. It is thought-provoking without diving too deeply into politics.
The role of digital twins and their potential disruptive capability is alluded to at the end of the book. This becomes even more relevant with the recent release of non-peer-reviewed research led by Stanford and Google’s DeepMind (PDF) that created “computational agents that replicate human behavior across domains.”3
This is a story about the characters. It is about their relationships. It is also a love story with an interesting twist. Ultimately, it is the classic plot of a flawed hero willing to sacrifice himself to save humanity.
Virtual Vengeance is a must-read novel for anyone who wants a better understanding of the impact of technological developments on humanity.
About Thomas J.J. Starr #
When he wrote this book, Thomas J. J. Starr was chairman of the Broadband Forum (where this reviewer is currently Director of Marketing). He is a longtime senior telecommunications network engineer, having been recognized for his accomplishments by multiple organizations, including as one of the one hundred most powerful persons in telecommunications in 2010 by Global Telecoms Business. He is the author of two non-fiction books and three fiction books. His other works of fiction include:
- Fatal Entanglement – The price of peace is too high in this thriller where villains are using quantum physics and genetic engineering to attempt to reshape the human species.
- Retrograde – a cyberwar thriller where the United States finds itself on the losing side and must resort to World War II technology.
Some Additional Notes #
The following are some notes for those who want prompt starters for a book club meeting.
- Page 8 has a great analogy of how the steam engine amplified muscle power, the telegraph enhanced communications, and how the web and distributed computing are the basis for communal intelligence.
- From sensors that detect smell to virtual fences based on directed microwave energy to neural networking to digital twins, Starr weaves cutting-edge technologies into his story.
- There’s also a strong argument for making one’s clothes; at the minimum, don’t purchase clothes containing RFID tags.
- Page 17 makes the case for turning off one’s camera during a conference call.
- Page 24 may be an unintended reference to the bit clock invented at the University of Illinois by an undergrad student in the late 1970s.
- The eye tracking system is reminiscent of this interview from CES2018 which shows the potential for improving learning outcomes and diagnosing early childhood development issues.
- At the same time his humorous chapter introducing eye tracking points to a more serious theme of using this technology to infer thoughts and intentions.
- Page 118 – Would it be possible to escape using cash in today’s electronic money world?
- Page 80 makes an argument similar to what Princeton Professor Kornhauser has suggested is needed for autonomous vehicles. That is, the housefly may have an algorithm that could greatly simplify autonomous mobility.
- The virtual executive assistant is reminiscent of Ambrogio, Designer and Futurist, Mike Robinson’s fictional AI assistant.
Footnotes #
- There are other breakthroughs, presumably enabled by this superintelligence, such as drugs that result in weight loss. ↩︎
- See bullets 2 through 4 in the “Chirps and Short Thoughts” section. ↩︎
- Created with only a brief two-hour interview among a group of 1,052 people, these “agents” or digital twins matched the answers of the human subjects with 85% accuracy. It isn’t too hard to imagine that this accuracy could be greatly improved by fusing together external sensors (e.g. smartphones, smarthome, etc.) to improve the accuracy to a point where the digital twin is indistiguinshable from its human forebearer.
There might be a lesson on the potential unintended consequences of a Duplicator from the comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes. ↩︎
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