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(Copied from a review done a long time ago.)
Date: 16 September 1993, 12:53:15 EDT
Subject: Review of Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky's "The Turing Option"
Note : Some mild spoilers in the following, although the book isn't particularly a suspense novel, and IMHO knowing the outcome will not materially reduce the reader's enjoyment of the book. (I can't stick in c-L due to my environment, but the moderators certainly can if they want to.)
Executive summary : Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" is must reading for anyone with an interest in AI. Harry Harrison, while not my favorite sf author, has done some good stuff, and is certainly respected in the field. From the combination I expected "The Turing Option" to be a really well-written novel with interesting plotting, good science, and neat new ideas. I was disappointed.
Setting : 2023 to 2026, North America. Thirty years in the future, but it feels a lot like 1993. There have been some significant advances in science, people carry gigabytes in their pockets and there's a little nanotech around, but basically people, nations, etc, are still the same. Vinge's singularity is nowhere in sight.
Premise : As it is about to be demo'd for the first time, a new advanced AI system is stolen, and its inventor shot and left for dead. The investigation of the crime makes no progress. The inventor has had a bullet through the brain, severing critical connections between the various parts of his thinking gear. Using state-of-the-art nanotech and brain science, and some technology developed by the patient himself, many of the connections are restored. He ends up with his memories intact up to about the age of 14, and sets out to re-invent the AI that was stolen, and catch the bad guys. He is hampered by the need for intense security to keep the bad guys from coming back and finishing him off.
Story : The story itself is reasonably well-done. The pacing is fast enough, the plotline simple enough, and the underlying concepts interesting enough to get me from the start to the end.
Characterization : Weak to non-existent. The premise has the potential for at least two major character-developments: Brian (the inventor) needs to go from almost-dead to 14-year-old-in-24-year-old-body to grownup, and the machine intelligences that he creates need to go from non-working prototype to human-level (or beyond) minds. But the authors don't show us either of these things. Brian goes from almost-dead, through a couple of dream-memories of his childhood, and then ZONK he's a supposedly-14-year-old who is in fact completely rational, has no apparent internal conflicts or confusions, is able to function completely as an adult, and doesn't change noticably throughout the rest of the book. The AIs go from not working, through one amusing almost-working demo, and then ZONK they're there, as intelligent flawless super-human-type machine intelligences that can learn a new language or a new skill in minutes, are politer than Brian, and call up phone-sex lines to practice their language skills and study human sexual culture. Oh, well.
The minor characters are also flat. The Bad General is a cardboard cutout Bad General, the main bad guy who arranged for the original theft and almost-killing of Brian is barely seen at all, and has no plausible motivation when he is, and so on. Good sf novels can of course get away with little or no characterization if the ideas or storytelling are neat enough. Read on...
Storytelling : "The Society of Mind" is a marvelously-told book, made up of one-page nuggets of clearly-expressed stuff that link together and point to each other in compelling ways. Harry Harrison's books generally have a certain touch of wry humor that gives them a distinctive flavor. This book is neither of those things; I kept looking for an "as told to Biff Jones" somewhere on the copyright page. It's done in the uninspired high-school-English-class prose of your average written-for-paperback hack novel. Many important actions are completely undermotivated: Brian at one point decides that he doesn't *want* to get back all his disconnected memories and become his previous 24-year-old self, because of some notes he finds that his previous self wrote about "Zenome Therapy". This seems like it could be a major plot element: Brian's attempt to re-invent his AI without at the same time awakening too much of the former self that's still in his brain somewhere, and falling into whatever "Zenome therapy" is again. But that doesn't happen; "Zenome therapy" itself is mentioned exactly once more in the book, on the same page, and no conflict between the current and former Brians is ever brought in again; the issue of his missing ten years of memories vanishes about 150 pages in and never reappears in any significant way. (With the exception of the bizarre last page of the book, in which Brian suddenly declares that the Bad Guys really won, and killed his humanity, and he's really just a Machine Intelligence himself, cry, whine, moan. This is also completely unmotivated.)
In another key scene, Brian, following up a clue that his AI found hidden within the programming of an AI recovered from the bad guys, walks into what from the reader's point of view has at least a 50% chance of being a deathtrap. But, as he apparently knew all along (perhaps the authors told him), the message was planted by a good guy who was just working for the bad guys for awhile, and really has Brian's best interests at heart.
Editing : There are a few nitty oddnesses in the book that suggest hasty or scanty editing. The (non)word "orientated" occurs at least a couple of times, as does reference to "a circuitry" in a context that clearly means "a subroutine". There is also evidence of some uncareful shortening; we are shown a demo of an AI that doesn't work because of too much inhibition, but the following dialogue clearly suggests that there was also a demo of one that had not enough inhibition, but we missed seeing that somehow. (It's possible that some of the undermotivated actions I moan about above are also due to overhasty editing-out of motivating or explanatory scenes.)
Science : The science in the book should have been a compelling current theory coupled to an experienced sf writer's ability to extrapolate. It wasn't. The basic idea of mind as a quasi-hierarchy of agents that each do a simple job and are overseen by other agents, and so on, played a key role in the plot, as Brian's agents are re-connected in order to restore his mind. But the concept struck me as *just* a relatively isolated plot element. Except for one incident in his youth, the idea is never used to show Brian, or the AIs he creates, in any interesting lights. The idea itself is not developed in any speculative ways; you'll get more fiction-like speculation in The Society of Mind than in this novel.
There are also a painful number of science problems outside the main scientific thrust of the book. At one point Brian discovers that he can access the memory banks of the computers that were implanted in his brain as part of his operation. The surgeon tests this by uploading the contents of a scientific article into the CPUs in his head, and he can then "read" the article word-for-word. No mechanism is suggested by which this might work; it's the usual bad-sf assumption that all information-processors speak the same language. I cannot myself imagine *any* mechanism by which the neurons in Brian's brain could have learned ASCII, and I would have appreciated at least some hand-waving towards the question. At another point, an Expert Systems guru that has been hired to assist Brian decides that she can help solve the original crime by writing an Expert System to consider all the information, and suggest answers. She does, and it provides great help in solving the case. Gee, funny no one thought of doing that before! Seems clear that if ES technology were at that level, it would be a routine part of criminal investigation (the book does not suggest that she has made some great breakthrough in ES in order to do it).
The last part of the book suffers from the Transporter Problem. Gene Roddenberry (I think it was) once commented that the writers on Star Trek had problems coming up with situations that the Transporter couldn't solve. The AIs that are developed towards the end of this book have a similar effect: in any physical or intellectual activity, they are better and faster than humans. They can teach themselves languages and skills almost instantly, do many things at once, have micromanipulators that let them juggle individual molecules, can listen in on radio and telephone traffic apparently by magic (another bad-sf premise: all machines speak the same language), and so on. The main Bad Guy is found at the end of the book because someone happens to see him walking down the street. Why didn't the magic AIs just scan through all the world's photographic databases looking for his face, or whatever? Every time the humans have some problem towards the end of the book, the obvious right thing to do would just be to ask an AI. But they only do that when it fits the plot.
This leads to my main tech-related frustration with the book. Mankind has now developed intelligent systems that are faster, smarter, tougher, and more reliable than he is. What will this lead to? In the real world, I think it would obviously lead to an unimaginable shakeup of every facet of world culture. There would be riots, religious denunciations, acts of sabotage and rebellion, the potential for massive (human) unemployment, the end of nations, breakdown of many cultural institutions, etc, etc. Humanity would face a huge challenge in trying to come to an accommodation with the machine intelligences, without either being wiped out, pushed aside as an irrelevant inferior species, or ending up in a disastrous series of wars to eliminate the new competitors. I'd love to see a well-written novel addressing these things. But in "The Turing Option", the only people who can think of any uses for the AIs are Brian, the AIs themselves (sorry, "MIs"; they prefer to be called "Machine Intelligences"), and the bad guys who stole the original AI. And what are the uses they come up with? The bad guys produce a product called Bug-Off, which is a robot with a dumbed-down AI that picks bugs off of plants. Brian goes beyond this, pointing out that MIs will also be really good at planting and harvesting crops, and hey maybe even transporting them to market. And he thinks they'll make really good household servants! What intellectual daring.
The bizarre final scene of the book suffers from the Transporter Problem acutely. Without giving it away entirely, it's your typical "brave good guys walk in to arrest the bad guy, but it turns out he unfairly has a gun, and a tense confrontation ensues" scene. The problem is that one of the MIs is there. To be consistent with the MI abilities in the rest of the book, he should have simply picked up a stone with the manipulators in his left pseudo-foot and flung it at supersonic speed at the bad guy, knocking the gun from his hand and engraving "I am a Bad Person" on his forehead on the rebound. Instead, the MI *grapples* with the bad guy to save Brian's life, and the gun goes off and you get to guess who got shot etc. Shortly after that Brian begins whining about how the bad guys really won after all, for no apparent reason (see above).
Recommendation : I see I've waxed pretty negative here. I don't think it's a great book, nor that it'll be remembered long (ironically, the back cover says that it "ranks with Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park"; I tend to agree: I think they're both ephemeral). I wouldn't recommend it to the general reader, or the very picky sf reader. On the other hand, if you enjoy 400-page quick reads, and are interested in having a reasonably complete collection of current AI-related sf, it's probably worth the six bucks.
%A Harrison, Harry %A Minsky, Marvin %T The Turing Option %I Warner Books; Questar Science Fiction %C New York %D October 1993 (copyright 1992) %G ISBN 0-446-36496-7 %P 409 pp. %O paperback, US$5.99
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