Internationally celebrated author finishes it off
Internationally celebrated author Robert J. Sawyer completes his WWW trilogy with style and Wonder .
Sawyer’s trilogy — Wake Watch Wonder — tells the story of the emergence growth and evolution of humanities’ first artificial intelligence (AI); Webmind a sentient entity that develops in the web of the world’s Internet infrastructure.
With its “birth” in Wake the conscious entity at first does not realize that it isn’t alone in the universe but without a way to communicate or to perceive humanity and the world it is trapped and alone in dark solitude. Sawyer’s analogy to the infant mind is dramatically described in terms of the famous story of a young Helen Keller who was deaf blind and mute but learned how to communicate with the outside world through the heroic efforts of her teacher Annie Sullivan. Webmind’s “teacher” is the character Caitlin Decter a 16-year-old blind math prodigy whose technologically based cure of her form of blindness allows her to see the World Wide Web and perceive the existence of Webmind. Wake is the story of how she leads the nascent intelligence to the light.
With Watch we are given front row seats to the show of Webmind’s growth evolution and coming out to the world at large. Webmind’s abilities grow geometrically as it adapts to the near infinite amount of information on the World Wide Web. It grows as a moral being; making choices based on ethics and a wise understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of its human creators. From there Wonder tells the story of a world after what Sawyer labels the ““Nerd Rapture.”
The greatest creation in Robert Sawyer’s story in WWW is Webmind. It is a humane warm and intriguing character with abilities that could not just save the world but become the greatest gift humanity has ever given itself if only by accident.
Wonder is the book readers have been waiting for since reading Wake and it is dare I say wonderful. Sawyer writes that the only thing a web-emergent consciousness has to worry about is keeping human civilization around to interact with as helpers students friends and family. Sawyer describes Webmind as “highly ethical because [Webmind] wants to keep himself alive and valuable to humanity.”
The idea that the web could be host to a friendly AI is a theory that has been argued since the inception of the Internet but never explored in fiction except as malign bent on enslaving or destroying humanity à la Terminator. Sawyer’s book looks at AI as the greatest leap forward possible. “We have not solved many of our really big problems” says Sawyer. “The biggest problems we can come up with may be too big for our brains alone to solve we have extended our mind’s power to solve problems with computers and our mind’s children are indeed AI to help us.”
But the most intriguing notion of a global omnipresent moral and friendly web consciousness is what it would mean to human liberty and world peace.
“For AI to exist it has to maximize the world’s happiness” Sawyer says. “Without human civilization it has no one to talk to and will quickly die without the millions of man hours it takes to keep the web running. Part of that would entail making the humanity free of tyranny and despotism.”
Sawyer’s eminent example has already played out in real life in limited form in the Middle East particularly the uprising in Egypt. “Egypt did what China did in my book” he says referring to the desperate measures of the dying government of Hosni Mubarak sealing off Egypt from the Internet. “What happened is a vindication of what happens when despotic governments try to control information” says Sawyer. “The Internet is a powerful ally in the battle between the State versus the individual. With the web we are watching the watchers.”
To writers like Sawyer the beauty is in the details. The characters in Wonder — Caitlin her friends and family — are troubled by problems both great and small making the world real and tactile. Sawyer’s story descriptions are so close to home liberally decorated with pop-culture references and in-jokes (type in any of the bit.ly links that Webmind has on his Twitter feed from the book) for any reader who likes great ideas to be comfortable and fun without spending an hour on Wikipedia to “get it.” By the end of the book you want Webmind to actually exist a possibility that Sawyer believes is “inevitable.”
“There is nothing mystical about intelligence” says Sawyer. “We keep making more and more complex things and sooner or later I can see AI being there to help us.”
