Society of the Mind

Harry, Eric L. Society of the Mind. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

Title alludes to Marvin Minsky's theory and 1986 book, Society of Mind.

Stock summary, possibly from the publisher: "In the year 2003, psychologist Laura Aldridge is offered a million dollars for one week's consulting, by the richest man on Earth [Joseph Gray]. When she lands on the Gray Corporation's South Pacific Island she finds a supertech domain, at the heart of which lies a secret that will affect the future of humanity." The secret is a supercomputer buried beneath the ocean's floor.

From the Kirkus review (1996, posted on line 2010): [...] Laura's job is to analyze the computer to decide (1) if it has achieved sentience, and (2) if it's depressed. Yes--in both cases: Gray's magnificent computer is a very upset adolescent girl named Gina. Harry plays out this nonsense with a dour seriousness, but the ideas he puts forth, and his knowledge of computing, are extremely engaging. Laura's conversations with Gina, Gina's paranoid fears of an "Other" gradually usurping her functions, driverless cars, virtual reality, the limits of digital computing, the advent of "neurocomputing" and true artificial intelligence, high-level robots that evolve from infancy into adolescence, the necessity of space exploration, rocketry, and mining in space are all discussed with informed, cutting-edge flair, and it's refreshing to read a tale of this sort in which the computer fails to run amok.

Discussed by John Johnston, "Computer Fictions: Narratives of the Machinic Phylum" (which see). Johnston asserts that in Society "bio-technological interfaces" such as the "brain sockets" in Pat Cadigan's Synners (called "bionics" in Society) "are explicitly rejected in order to focus more completely on a robotic world." Society, Johnston asserts, "draws directly from the robotics scientist Hans Moravec's book Mind Children, which speculates that current trends in computer and robotic technology could serve as the intermediary bridge to the suppression of human organic life altogether in the auto-production of a futuristic machine world" — and calls our attention to the novel's use of "virtual reality scenes" (VR), "humans interacting with robots who have feelings and a kind of group consciousness, dialogues with a strong AI, and flashy, cutting[-]edge ideas about consciousness, genetic algorithms, and neural nets" (Johnston p. 460) — bringing together a number of relevant motifs or tropes (on their way perhaps, with age and poor handling, to become clichés).

RDE, Initial Compiler, 14Mar19