AI Apocalypse - Book Review


AI Apocalypse - by William Hertling - is the sequel to Avogadro Corp - which I read and reviewed a few days ago.

The sequel is almost as good as the original. The story takes place a few years after Avogadro Corp. ELOPe is still hidden, but has enormous influence. It designed the most used computer designs, a mesh network that is now the main mean of net access for mankind, achieved world peace and mostly cured cancer.

Now Leon, a teen genius, is coerced into writing a virus. But he is too good, and now ELOPe is going to have to save mankind from the consequence.

Pretty good and I really enjoyed it.

Some annoying points, however (Spoiler Alert) - the ending seems a bit forced (what about all the backbones?). The teen genius card was unnecessary and cheapens the story to a direct-to-TV movie level.

And the main argument includes a magical program that reverse engineers and analyses software to steal functions - itself an AI complete problem. I LOLed a bit when Leon said no one had done it before - yes, because it is probably impossible. A bit of excessive nit-picking, I know.

The author could have at least made the original virus pull code from open source repositories using appropriate keywords and then evolve to just disassembling everything - much more believable. I imagine almost no one else cared, though :-)

The end of the e-book has a preview of The Last Firewall - the final book in the series. Looks good so far.

Relevant, likely to happen soon tech - smartphones has dozens or hundreds of cores and just connect to TVs to work as regular computers (yes, there are already products with docking stations, but it is not here yet - could probably be done easily with bluetooth keyboards/mouses and WiDi, if it ever takes off).

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