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Loading... The Kraken Project (Wyman Ford Series) (original 2014; edition 2014)by Douglas Preston
Work InformationThe Kraken Project by Douglas Preston (2014)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. The Kraken Project is a SciFi book that preaches too much to the readers. It is not up to the adventure and suspense of Douglas Preston's books. The story was almost silly. There were brutal murders, stock exchange explanations, sad adolescent, political figures who came and went out of nowhere, false arrests, an autonomous computer program that talked, chases, and so forth. Consequently, only three stars were given in this review. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to SeriesWyman Ford (4)
"NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is designing a probe which will be dropped into the Kraken Mare, one of the methane seas of Titan. There, it will embark on a journey of exploration. As the probe is being tested at Goddard, things go awry, and an explosion kills seven scientists. The AI program in the probe, a powerful, self-modifying AI called "Dorothy," flees into the Internet. Series character Wyman Ford is tapped by the president's science advisor to track down the software with the help of Dorothy's creator, Melissa Shepherd. As the two of them trace Dorothy in her wanderings in cyberspace, they realize Dorothy's horrific experiences in the wasteland of the Internet have changed her--utterly. But for the better . . . or worse? At the same time, they learn Dorothy is being pursued by a pair of Wall Street high-frequency traders, who want to turn her into an algorithmic-trading slave-bot. Pursued relentlessly by the traders, Dorothy jumps out of the Internet into a child's toy robot, to hide. Now the only person standing between the murderous algo traders and Dorothy is a lonely, twelve-year-old boy living on an isolated bay on the coast of northern California. But is Dorothy bent on doing good . . . or on wiping out the cancer of the human race?"-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Since I worked with computers beginning in the 1980s, when I first built my own from surplus parts and reject bare circuit boards, I'm probably a harsher critic for a book such as this because I know how things work. But I'm also pretty open-minded about what might be possible, so this was only a small part of why I didn't like this as much as the others in the series.
I think the author may have been trying to explore a little about the difference between a human mind and a computer mind; I've read other books about this, where people were able to transfer all their memory to external storage, like a backup, and then if something happens they can be restored. In some book, there were bodies developed for this, and a person might even change sex. This turns out to be an interesting solution to things like sexism and racism, etc. It also leaves open the possibility to make copies of yourself, each of which has lived the same life up to the point of backup.
But this story didn't get that sophisticated. It was simply a story about an AI that became very human-like, which has been done before, most notably by HAL in "2001 A Space Odyssey" or PKD's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (perhaps better known by the movie name "Blade Runner"). To me, this story didn't hold up as well as the others, especially technically - like in this book, there were places where the program has the ability to be trapped in a computer when the power was abruptly stopped, without being saved and restored
Aside from the AI issues, the story was interesting, but not really very sophisticated. It was interesting enough to keep me reading, but not really that satisfying in the end. ( )