AI versus AI

kw: book reviews, mysteries, science fiction, artificial intelligence

Delete All Suspects by Donna Andrews is classified as a Mystery novel. The author's use of AIPs, or Artificially Intelligent Personalities, puts the book also in the Sci Fi realm.

Let me begin with a quibble. The principal AIP involved here, named Turing Hopper (AKA Alan Grace...could you guess?), is just a bit too human. There is a bit of soliloquy in Turing's thoughts (italic text in the narrative) about AIP limitations and inability to understand many human concerns. However, Turing comes across as a rather nerdy young woman. I don't recall if the human characters in the story attribute a gender to Turing, but this AIP has a woman's voice and sensibilities. Of course, the author can most convincingly speak in her own gender space...and I get the idea that Ms Andrews would like to be reincarnated as Turing Hopper (This is analogous to Isaac Asimov's clear sympathy and wishful identification with his deified R. Daneel Olivaw).

Be that as it may, I've sometimes wondered how a person would function if the bodily component of mind, the endocrine system, were absent. Perhaps one day someone will experience a corporectomy (the subjective side of a beheading) and be attached to sufficient life support for the head to live on. Without the body and its mind-bending glands attached, could the mind even work? Would you get the detached head seen in some Sci Fi stories, continuing with little change, or would you get the rapid development of extreme psychosis, or simply "mind death" (catatonic coma)? I vote for the latter. The body has too much to do with the mind. In particular, most emotions require chemical support from various bodily organs located far from the head—though you'd have to cut pretty high to leave out the thyroid and parathyroids. Turing experiences guilt, sadness, elation, foreboding, and dread. Unlikely, in my view.

OK, putting that aside, we have a very engaging tale of digital skullduggery and non-digital murder. There is the fear of digital murder (deletion...), and a modified, handicapped copy of Turing, whom she thinks of as her sister T2, figures largely in a parallel plot. This could lay the ground for a series of sequels, and I hope this is what the author intends (Note: her title list hints that this book is already a sequel).

Turing in this book, and her AIP friend KingFischer, serve as the perfect investigator's aides: lightning-fast with any kind of computer work, including "white hat" hacking and digital surveillance. They can do many things at once. Much dramatic tension revolves around them doing very many things at once.

There are at least two, or probably three, murders, done to keep the covers on some shady and illegal enterprises being performed using computers managed by a young basement computer wizard named Eddie. Sad to say, his only appearance opens the book, and he does not play any part in the plot thereafter, except as the missing hub of a collapsing wheel. But that's often the way life is. You don't get to rescue everyone. And the private detective Tim and his colleagues are shown much more realistically than in most PI stories: secure in what they do well, insecure when they don't understand, very human and likeable. Not for this author is the patient, infinitely competent Hercule Poirot, or a hard-boiled bulldozer like Sam Spade.

The side thread of the story, including hints of other AIPs besides Turing and KingFischer and the theft and attempted suborning of T2, opens up the interesting question: if genuine AIPs come into being at some time, will we let them exist?