The final book in his trilogy concerning AIs, sentience and humanity, this is also the weakest book. Generations ago, an AI named The Watcher developed and set itself up as the caretaker of humanity. Under its ever-watchful gaze, all thinking beings, digital, robotic or atomic, are petted and cared for. Social Care watches over everyone, making sure no one is too depressed or lonely, ensuring that even the smallest urges toward violence or self-destruction are turned to more positive impulses. But some chafe under the eye of the Watcher—DIANA, a corporation that wants to take the Watcher’s place, and Chris, an AI that wants no Watcher at all. And while the three great powers fight for supremacy, the mindless menace of the Black Velvet Bands and Schrödinger Boxes (which attract and are attracted to intelligence, and are eventually lethal) threaten humanity’s very survival. I liked characters in the first two books, but this one has no main characters (and only one minor character, Eva) that interest me at all. Also, I find it hard to be opposed to an AI that cares for humanity—I’m sure being cared for, and helped to care for others, is a terrible threat to freedom, but I can’t get too worked up about it. I was a bit leery of the savior of the books, a system of thought/software program/way of life called Free Enterprise, and the fact that its main proponent is an alien robot who offhandedly mentions that he was built by Jesus and the Apostles. Um, fuck that. ( )

6/6/12 Divergence, Tony Ballantyne, 2007. It started slowly with too many characters, but then zoomed off into the depths of the story with all its philosophical issues and amazing details. The ending, as was to be expected, verged on the psychedelic symbolic images of 2001 the movie, but did not go over that abyss. Too many great ideas were contained in the processing space of this trilogy to mention them all but a few of my favorites were: “... so what if your mind is a TM? You are greater than the sum of your parts.”; the dark plants being fixed in space by the observation of an intelligence; the n-string game and Schroedinger’s Cat’s Cradle; “There are different levels of programming languages, so why not one specifically for the soul?”
A you would expect from an author who taught math and IT, these books are full of mathematical references. Although the story is built mostly on computer science and artificial intelligence, it mentions stellated icosahedrons and dodecahedrons, the Sierpinski Gasket and the Mandelbrot set, the golden ratio, Riemannian transforms, and Hilbert space. It even includes the formula for Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle! One of the characters sails off in a spaceship called the Fourier Transform, on which the classical mathematical impossibilities are no longer impossible: creating a formal way for determining a proof, finding an even number that is not the difference of two primes, having a recursive set for everything, a solution for an NP complete problem, and all the other NP problems tumbling into P. ( )

Ballantyne concludes his trilogy without pulling out of the problem that dogged it from the beginning: the real conflict in the story is between forces far larger than human, and all the people in the story are pretty much shepherded through that conflict as spectators rather than actors making meaningful decisions. The last book manages to throw in a bunch of new ideas for dealing with the threats introduced in previous books without explaining how they solve the problem, or using them to solve the problem. (e.g.: The Schrödinger Kittens are cool, but nothing ever explains how they do what they do and they don’t wind up actually providing more than window dressing.)

I wonder if Ballantyne is trying to make some sort of point about oppressive nanny states and free markets, but the presentations in here are such extreme caricatures that they don’t really relate to anything sensible. (One the one hand, you have a powerful AI called the Watcher running a nanny state that enforces altruism on everyone by understanding their motivations so well it can manipulate them, and on the other you have a truly amazing AI called Free Exchange that can somehow figure out how to solve everybody’s problems and set up “fair” exchanges that will solve them— without any explanation of how it works, so they’re just as manipulated.) ( )