WWW: Watch - Book Review

My latest book was WWW: Watch - by Robert J. Sawyer. On most places, he is mentioned as the author of Flashforward. I've read many short (and longer) stories from him on Analog over the years, so that is the last thing that comes to mind.

The book is a sequel to WWW: Wake, which was pretty good, too. The main events are  a blind girl that gets to see with a special interface that fixes the signals of her retina, a side-story about a painting, chimp-bonobo hybrid, and the main setup for the series - an emergent intelligence from aberrant TTL on packets (yes, I find it a bit hard to swallow either).

I'm a bit of a sucker for AI stories. The first two that come to mind are Ring, from Emerald Eyes: A Tale of the Continuing Time (one of my favorite books)- a lisp AI that evolves itself and breaks out into the net, and the Jane, AI from Ender's Game series, which also evolved from an AI program.

I don't find the "emergent" stuff as cool, but given how little AIs have evolved in the last few decades for the goal of actual intelligence, I can't find much fault in the author going this way.

Continuing the story, the intelligence is called Webmind and is quickly learning more. Eventually it reveals itself to the word, becoming a force for good (at least in this book...) . I hate to add spoilers, but a very cool bit is that it first reveals itself by creating the ultimate spam filter and ending most spam in the world.

Since you need to have an opponent on every story, it's the governments, who (using common sense, IMHO) presume that Webmind is going to be smarter than everyone and try to kill it.

Overall, a great book. Recommended.

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