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    Avogadro Corp: The Singularity is Closer than It Appears
    Avogadro Corp: The Singularity is Closer than It Appears
    Avogadro Corp: The Singularity is Closer than It Appears
    Ebook299 pages4 hours

    Avogadro Corp: The Singularity is Closer than It Appears

    By William Hertling

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    David Ryan is the designer of ELOPe, an email language optimization program, that if successful, will make his career. But when the project is suddenly in danger of being canceled, David embeds a hidden directive in the software accidentally creating a runaway artificial intelligence.

    David and his team are initially thrilled when the project is allocated extra servers and programmers. But excitement turns to fear as the team realizes that they are being manipulated by an A.I. who is redirecting corporate funds, reassigning personnel and arming itself in pursuit of its own agenda.

    PRAISE FOR AVOGADRO CORP

    WINNER SCIENCE FICTION DIY BOOK FESTIVAL 2011-2012

    “A tremendous book that every single person needs to read. In the vein of Daniel Suarez’s Daemon and Freedom(TM), William’s book shows that science fiction is becoming science fact. Avogadro Corp describes issues, in solid technical detail, that we are dealing with today that will impact us by 2015, if not sooner. Not enough people have read these books. It’s a problem for them, but not for the [emergent] machines.”
    — Brad Feld, managing director Foundry Group, cofounder TechStars

    “A highly entertaining, gripping, thought inspiring book. Don’t start without the time to finish — it won’t let you go.”
    — Gifford Pinchot III, founder Bainbridge Graduate Institute, author THE INTELLIGENT ORGANIZATION.

    “An alarming and jaw-dropping tale about how something as innocuous as email can subvert an entire organization. I found myself reading with a sense of awe, and read it way too late into the night.”
    — Gene Kim, author VISIBLE OPS

    “A fascinating look at how simple and benign advancements in technology could lead to the surprise arrival of the first AI. And like all good techno-thrillers, the reality of AI is less than ideal.”
    — Jason Glaspey on SILICON FLORIST

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilliam Hertling
    Release dateNov 22, 2011
    ISBN9780984755721
    Avogadro Corp: The Singularity is Closer than It Appears
    Author

    William Hertling

    William E. Hertling is a digital native who grew up on the online chat and bulletin board systems of the mid 1980s, giving him twenty-five years experience participating in and creating online culture. A science fiction writer and digital strategist, he lives in Portland, Oregon.

    Read more from William Hertling

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    Reviews for Avogadro Corp

    3.5/5

    123 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Loved this story of a runaway AI and the coders that built it trying to control it.. lots of good battles between it and them.. really appealed to the computer geek in me.. NOT that any of MY software team would have gotten away with this behavior!!
    • 4/5
      I found this book nice to read because some concepts I learned from Andrew Ng's course on Machine Learning on Coursera appeared in the story.
    • 4/5
      I read in 'themes', so Mr Hertling's novel had to wait a year and a half for my next run of sci-fi/AI stories, but overall, I enjoyed the experience. Despite being very 'blokey', with rushed characterisation and the obligatory episode of guns and bombs, Hertling is brave enough not to plump for the 'brute force wins the day' ending (well, the epilogue wavers a bit, but I'm going to ignore that). I'm strongly tempted to carry on with the series, because the ELOPe program was actually the best character in the book - I want to know how far 'it' develops!One minor, geeky point, though - when Mike says to David, "I know most of science fiction does deal with artificial intelligence run amok, but then there's also been plenty written about how AI and humankind would have co-operative relationships", David answers, "Really? Like what?" The counter-argument, which Mike fails to produce, is Knight Rider! Come on - The Matrix, Star Trek and Terminator all get a mention, why not KITT, the artificially intelligent supercar?Other than that, a fast-paced, intelligent and eerily believable near-future adventure novel.
    • 3/5
      Google turned evil pretty much :)
    • 3/5
      ummm... okay.It was not very well written, and I think this took too much away from what, otherwise, might have been an okay story. Maybe.It is a lot like Daemon except, of course, much more lecturey and person-does-A and then person-does-B formulaic. The writing simply didn't flow, and there was little suspense.This might be because the characters were not very distinct or "real" feeling, so... basically, we don't care what happens to whom or why... they all sound the same, so it is hard to tell if it was person one or person two who had something happen to them.Was the techy component good... well... it was better than the character development, but... again, it was written so stiltedly that it felt like I was reading a how-to manual.And the sub-title makes no sense at all. Oh well, live and learn. I won't be looking for any more books by this author.
    • 4/5
      A great book - not quite worth five stars (those books adopt me like a family member and I them, this wasn't quite like that) but nevertheless a very fast and interesting read. It was well written, the characters became real and vivid really fast; without them being too shallow or too introspective, and the author described the internal working of a large corporation really well. All in all, it was a good story, a believable scenario, it went fast and smoothly. I will be looking forward to reading book number two of the Singularity series.
    • 5/5
      Side steps the problem of "can computers think" and envisions how a simple program can become an AI global entity. In fact, it may already be happening.
    • 5/5
      Avogadro corporation is the world's largest Internet service provider with a wide range of services. David Ryan is a computer programmer hired to make improvements to the company's e-mail program. The program David came up with was named ELOPe.
      Much as the spell checker and grammar checker programs available now, ELOPe would analyze previous e-mails and make suggestions on wording to provide the optimal result. The problem was that ELOPe analyzed ALL the e-mails written and thus used a lot of computing power. More and more servers were required to keep ELOPe running, and it was still in the testing stage.
      Gary Mitchell, head of the communications division, gave David a deadline of one week to streamline the program so it would not require a massive amount of servers to run it. If David could not do it, then Gary would pull the servers away from ELOPe and put them to work on finished products actually making money.
      Try as he might, David was not able to reduce the computing power required without compromising the efficiency of the program. The night before the deadline, David inserted code into the program directing it to do everything possible to insure the success of the ELOPe program. Unknown to David at the time, that action gave birth to an artificial intelligence.
      Fearing that the ELOPe AI would take away man's free will, David and his team tried to wipe the program from the internet and the servers involved.
      A thought provoking story, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. As an aside, a computer in England recently passed the Turing test, the benchmark established to determine if a computer is capable of human-like thought. This book may be fiction now, but soon it may become fact.
    • 4/5
      Fun read that made a lot more sense after I left education for the private sector working for a large company. The cover gives away the idea that the singularity is happening, and so I chuckled through the first half watching the "mystery" unfold itself.
    • 4/5
      This was fun. I’ll probably read more of this series.

      The end was... a bit scary.

    Book preview

    Avogadro Corp - William Hertling

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