f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] Daemon (Daemon, #1) [Author] Daniel Suarez [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2009 [Read] 2013/03/27 [Review] 
An unfriendly AI designed by a dead billionaire (who for some reason reminded me a little of an evil John Carmack) takes over the world. The overall combination is good but nothing to write home about. The frequent appearance of autonomous vehicles is a nice touch and one too often absent from SF, near or far. Most of the technical details were good (I was not surprised to read the short author bio and learn Suarez is a practicing programmer, since the Ross character felt like an author self-insert). But the decentralized conspiracy was done better in Sterling’s “Maneki Neko”, the creepy persuasive AI was done better in ‘Friendship is Optimal’, the technical detail in Cryptonomicon, the futuristic developments in Otherland, and the plutocracy/government stuff in multiple William Gibson novels (Suarez’s version being more than a little bit crude - citing Confessions of an Economic Hitman, really?). And despite the lauded technical detail, the AI presented is farcical; it’s hard to see how any ‘logic tree’ could possibly handle all that the AI does even if Suarez throws in some failures to parse responses and writes up . (If I had an iPhone I’d probably snark about how Siri can understand the responses given by various characters fine, and hasn’t taken over the world.)
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