por Recently, I found a website where it is estimated what date you will receive your COVID vaccine according to age and occupation. I was not very surprised to find out that I will have to wait at least until April 2022 (yep, you read that correctly).
It is clear that things are going to take a long time and we have to shuffle and wait. While we resign ourselves to the designs of Divine Providence and practice the Christian virtue of patience, we must find a way to carry it. The best option is leisure, but since trips are ruled out and there is nothing left to watch on Netflix, all that remains is reading.
A few years ago I published a post about six little-known science fiction books, but that every geek worthy of the name should have read. Today we will do something similar, but adapted to the reality of 2021, with a pandemic, AI and the incipient cold war between the US and China.
Six science fiction books for 2021
The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu
I discovered this a few years ago, when people were starting to talk about Cixin Liu in the US. He is a Chinese author who was breaking sales records in his country and his work was praised as very original in the West. There are actually 3 books, and “The Three Body Problem” is the first of them.
The central idea of the book is that after sending a message to possible Martians, after a few years you receive this disturbing response:
Do not reply to this message or rebroadcast, or you will be invaded.
Needless to say, the protagonist screws up and puts us all in a mess.
This is a very original and surprising book. The first and biggest surprise is that the author is still alive. The first part of the book is a very harsh criticism of communism and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in China. For much less they disappeared Jackie Ma…
In the following two volumes, the author gives his explanation (very reasonable and disturbing) to the paradox of the lack of signs of intelligent life in the rest of the universe. Where is everybody? According to Cixin Liu, silent as whores and hidden.
The Ghost Fleet, P.W. Singer, et al
Another of the science fiction books that I recommend. We continue with the oriental theme, but in this case a little closer to home and a more immediate future. In the middle of the 21st century, the cold war between the US and China creates a heat of hold on and don’t move. The book tells what a conventional war between China and the US in the Pacific would be like, with Russia acting as China’s bailout.
The book is not very well written, and as a novel it is not the bomb that we say it is. The really interesting thing is how extremely well researched all the technology that could be used in said war is. Except for one exception that seems a bit out of hand, everything else is based on current projects: drones, electronic warfare, hypersonic missiles, etc.
The book provides a reasonable vision of what a war could be like in the 21st century with a meteoric rise of the Chinese economy and the consequent clash with the United States.
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
Nathaniel Borenstein is an American programmer, creator of the MIME format and responsible for attachments in emails. Considering the majority use that humanity has put to creating it, it is not surprising that it has become somewhat pessimistic.
A quote of his that I have always loved is the following:
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.
That’s what we’re going to talk about now. A story of the end of the world, by accident and by idiots. Kurt Vonnegut’s book is a festival of black humor in which several stories are intertwined that converge on a fictitious island in the Caribbean. A journalist who is writing a history of the Manhattan Project, a prophet of a delusional religion called Bokononism and a mad scientist.
The scientist is a brilliant chemist but without common sense, who manages to synthesize a new form of ice that does not exist in nature and is stable at room temperature: ice 9, or “ice 9”. His invention, to prevent soldiers from having to get mud on their boots, ends up causing an absolute disaster.
Of course, don’t worry that the Ice IX It exists, but it is harmless.
Locked In, John Scalzi
Now one of viruses and pandemics. In the near future, a new virus spreads across the world: Haden’s disease. For the vast majority of patients it only causes mild symptoms, similar to those of the flu (does this sound familiar to you?). However, for a minority, after many months of infection it causes a “lock in”, a confinement: patients 100% awake and conscious, but unable to move, express themselves or perceive something with their senses.
Manna, Marshall Brain
Here we leave pandemics, wars and Martians, and go with the other horseman of the Apocalypse of our times: AI and its effects on the labor market.
It all starts when a fast food chain implements new software to manage employees. This is Manna (for manager), an artificial intelligence system, which through headphones tells the employee what they should do at all times: take out the trash, clean the tables, bring more bread, put x hamburgers on the iron, etc.
It is about micromanaging unskilled labor so that it can flawlessly carry out a series of simple tasks. The employees are delighted and so is the company, since Manna has optimized costs and significantly improved productivity and customer satisfaction.
Everything described is 100% possible with current technology and I have no doubt that Amazon will set up a similar system in its warehouses in a short time. The truly surprising thing is how quickly everything goes to hell and turns into a horrific dystopia.
It’s a book that EVERYONE should read, because we might have to deal with it in less time than we think. So read Manna, and just in case, learn to program with and make sure you create the future Manna and not be managed by it. He who warns is not a traitor.
I have no mouth and I must scream, Harlan Ellison
I recently had the pleasure of interacting with the government-perpetrated Radar Covid App. After that “congress website” which Enrique Dans described as:
“(…) so, so extremely bad, that in addition to being a total discredit for the companies that dare to claim to have developed it, Telefonica and Indra, it leads us to consider the rigor in the standards of allocation of public budgets.”
and which cost a whopping 14 million (sic!), our wise government launches (overcome the challenge of web development) into mobile development. I don’t know how much it cost, and I prefer not to know, but it is a real gem:
What can’t be connected? Connect to where, by the way? That I have to do?
To end the suspense, I can tell you that the only way to “fix it” is to remove the app and reinstall it. Just like that, guys.
I felt like screaming, but I couldn’t.
As I thought that, I remembered the last book on the list. It is also a dystopia caused by poorly managed AI, created, of course, by the government. In this case, the governments of the US, the USSR (the book is old) and China create the Allied Mastercomputer to keep peace.
The creation must have been subcontracted to the same consulting firm responsible for the website and the app, and the thing ends like the Aurora rosary: the AMS becomes self-aware and (as Skynet would do years later), decides to exterminate Humanity for being idiots.
In this long story, or short novel, the 5 survivors try to escape from a vengeful and neurotic AI that insists on torturing them in the worst possible way.