Dead Girls, Richard Calder

Current reading is appropriate for a Halloween post, we’d think.  Richard Calder’s Dead Girls is not about corpses, although a few turn up along the way. It’s set in an extreme dystopian near-future where artificial intelligence, robotics and lethal fashionista rivalries have collided to produce a plague, the effective end-product of which is the transforming, by dint of their fathers’ corrupted DNA, the girls of the world into plastic creatures, dolls, and the men who love them into enslaved doll addicts. This is the first of Calder’s Dead… trilogy and it follows Ignatz, the central afflicted male, and the doll of his life, Primavera, back from a hyper-roboticized “Wild East” Asia to a quarantined London in search of the origins of the plague.

The edition we’re reading has a great cover, which is similar to this one below. It’s more exactly like the one you’ll see in the author’s link above  (with the title in a black box) , but this version could be rendered here in larger image, and has the same effect:

Dead Girls, by Richard Calder

Dead Girls, by Richard Calder, excerpt:

We drove through an empty concrete wilderness that might have been twinned with Troy, Carthage or Pompeii; all about us were the lineaments of greatness soiled by sudden defeat.

‘Whitechapel,’ informed our driver. ‘Brick Lane.’

Whitechapel. That was where Mum and Dad lived when they first came to England. Jumping the kerb to avoid a burned-out car, the Bentley swung into a warehouse.

We got out, Jo leading us across an oil-stained expanse littered with automobilia – the sort of place grease monkeys dream of going to when they die – to where a rusted samovar stood. There, bending over, she grasped an iron ring set in the floor, and pulled. A trap opened.

Beneath our feet, a spiral staircase unwound into infinity; a plume of green light rose from the depths, casting a halo upon the warehouse’s roof.

‘Down we go,’ said out escort.

***

No we  didn’t choose that passage just because in included the word ‘infinity.’ It’s dystopian! But we are attracted to the green and blue in the cover, the InfinityBound colors.

***

A more detailed capsule review of Dead Girls will appear in the “Dark Streets” Suspense/Mystery column. Deadline is tomorrow (!) so we must get to it but now that the subject meshes some with the new swerve of this blog here’re the links to the previous efforts.  The next will appear on the 15th of November. If we forget to post it, remind us.

Night Owl Reviews Magazine, Issue 8 – DARK STREETS
Night Owl Reviews Magazine, Issue 9 – DARK STREETS
Night Owl Reviews Magazine, Issue 10 – DARK STREETS
Night Owl Reviews Magazine, Issue 11 – DARK STREETS

The beginnings of Sheila’s search tech

In Kite Mason Dash sends Sheila on a search similar to the one used as an example in this story about a new artificial intelligence method for mega-fuzzy deep-topic searching, to be used to strip anonymity on the net.

Experts predict emergence of Human-level AI

H+ magazine does an extensive survey attempting to nail down 21 experts on the specific timeline and impact of  true artificial intelligence. Some predict Nobel Prize level scientific work within 30 years (for what that’s worth.) The Turing Test is mentioned. If you’re not familiar, that involves a kind of blindfold question-answer session, and for the machine to pass  it would be required that the human would not be able to tell the respondent is artificial.

Far be it from me to question official experts but this is a the kind of thing that always seems to be 20 years away. The incentive of these experts to promote the possibility cannot be taken into account because then there’d be no story. The responses are interesting and as scary as they’re meant to be but no specifics on how harmful AI will manifest is forthcoming. Science fiction is invoked to provide the atmosphere. 

Applying common sense, which always seems to befuddle experts,  just the question of which approach to take is a give-away that reliance on such experts to find a clear path will get you lost on a hurry. Probability theory came out as the most popular approach? I don’t know why it was even a choice. I supposed there must really be AI researchers out there pursuing a pure probabilities solution to AI, but  I’d think even the least intelligent human is getting it right well inside the margin of error, and the smartest of use are not walking around calculating the odds subconsciously.

For my money than I’d let it ride on one of those nonlinear dynamic systems.

Janet Dash’s adaptive modules

Here they are.  Adaptive intelligence in robots. Predator-prey behaviors. Is self-preservation inherent in intelligence? 

Don’t know who Janet Dash is? Read Kite!