Begin Your Journey With Avogadro Corp (Singularity, #1) Written And Illustrated By William Hertling Provided As Electronic Format

Terminator fans, you can think of this as SkynetLight,

David and Mike work for Avogadro, an Internet company with email, search engine, applications, . kind of like Google. David and Mike are working on an email function that scans your existing emails and those of whom you communicate with, When you later write an email to someone, this function offers changes to the way you've written it to optimize a favourable outcome.
If you email your boss to ask for vacation time, using this function's suggestions can almost guarantee you get the time you asked for.
They've named it ELOPe. The problem is that the amount of server space required for this is very large and the man in charge of making sure Avogadro clients have quick response with no down or lag time isn't happy.
He's going to request ELOPe be shut down, David gets an idea to save the project and starts writing code, After his updates have been added, things change, All of a sudden this project is a go, Thousands of new servers have been ordered, Outside help has been hired to come in to do upgrades, Major security has been added to the server farms, Then the government contracts get signed, from all over the world, The problem is that no one in the company did this, . . ELOPe did. When they realize the program is acting on its own, and is now in every server worldwide, they know they have to shut it down.
. . somehow.

The questions brought up are these: First, is a program like this just assisted manipulation, Then, is ELOPe an actual AI or just acting on programming, Are the things it's doing helping us is it on our side, How do you shut down a program that is worldwide when it's trying to protect itself,

Since this is a four book series, I assume things continue to go horribly wrong, especially with the twist at the end of this one.
It was a really good read and you don't need to have any real technical knowledge to understand it, I would recommend it for pretty much everyone who likes science fiction, I definitely enjoyed the references to Portland Oregon, where I live, and imagining a Googlelike company here, I probably wouldn't have read the book if I didn't live here in the same city as the author and have so many people I know recommending the book, but I'm glad I did.
It was a fun, fast paced read with a slightly possible scenario for the emergence of an AI, The benevolence of the AI reminded me a bit of the overlords in Childhood's End, which I just finished reading, but the uncertainty of the AI's motivation in the end and the blurb for the next book has me eagerly anticipating where the author will go next.
A few times I found myself thinking critically about the plausibility of situations, but I think a lot of that has to do with the very near present time setting, whereas I've read and overlooked issues in plenty of science fiction set in the distant future that was far less plausible and well thought out.
I imagine that near future science fiction is a tough area to write in well, and I'm excited to see what William Hertling will do next.
As a computer scientist and game AI programmer, this book scared me a bit, I kept trying to think of ways to disprove that an email AI like they created wasn't feasible, It's not I don't think, but only because there were a few too many leaps between basic pattern recognition and true causeeffect analysis, Nonetheless, it's eerily scary how close it seems we really could get to an AI using a system like the one described, Beyond the interesting idea of how to make an AI, the rest of the book was decent more of a thriller, which I'm normally not that into.
Still, I enjoyed it, and I have to say I empathized with David Ryan and what he wanted to do at the end.
shudder
This review applies to William Hertlings Singularity series comprised of Avogadro Corp, A, I. Apocalypse, and The Last Firewall,

As someone who worked in the software industry and in IT, as an entrepreneur, I found Hertlings series very intriguing, He is technically detailed, which adds to the stories realities and the possibility of a future for our world, but only for those who appreciate the intricacies of our connected society.


Had I the opportunity to score these books a,, I would have done so, Hertling keeps his stories fast paced and the reader entertained, despite the complexity of this subjects,
A quick read. This is a decent first novel by the author, but not spectacular, Avogadro is, obviously, a fictional parallel to Google, As technological singularities go, the premise here wasn't wholly ludicrous to begin with, but does get increasingly so as the storyline develops,

The character development leaves something to be desired it isn't likely that you'll identify with the blockheaded protagonists of the story, and grumpy old luddite Gene Keyes ends up being probably the most sympathetic of the dramatis personæ.




On the plus side, Google ought to totally consider building automated offshore data centers guarded by armed robots and powered by superabundant wave power.
Bandwidth may be more of a hurdle than presented herein, however,

Note to author: for heaven's sake, don't mention specific contemporary technologies utterly irrelevant to the narrative unless you wish your book to read irredeemably dated in a few short years.
"Ruby on Rails" soon enough will read more obscure than "Betamax" does today, and it's hard to imagine why one would wish to mention it explicitly.
Product placement
I'm a sucker for any fiction written around sitelink The Singularity, which is for Geeks like the Christian and Islamic Second Coming.
I'm particularly interested in stories where it occurs in our times, which would be hard to do, This is the first book of the Singularity Series, It's a sitelink handwaving attempt at the story I wanted to read,

The prose is this book is technically good, Dialog, descriptive prose and action sequences are OK, However, it is only workman like in a literary sense, Frankly, the prose felt flat and uninspired to me,

There is a large edutainment component to the story, A lot of it is A, I. and IT related, Its embarrassingly rich intech detail, but frequently leaps off into technobabble,

For example, I cringed at the leap of ELOPe the monster A, I. evolving from a rulesbased Expert system to passing a sitelinkTuring Test through a complicated rules table change and Ryan's software mastery during an allnighter.
In addition, the excruciatingly detailed exposition on Enterprise Data Center bandwidth requirements and protocol specifications speeds amp feeds in IT lingo was likewise cringe worthy.
It was like an accurate description of a footpath, when the intention was to describe a freeway,

When I started reading, I had great hope for the characters, They were a recognizable collection of geeks and suits, I gleefully thought I might be reading a geek novel like Microserfs , The engineers David Ryan nominally the protagonist and Mike Williams are well enough wrought, I also liked the inclusion of the Luddite Gene Keyes, Character development falters after that, The Avogadro Corp principals, Sean Leonov and Rebecca Smith fall into the Tony Stark and Iron Lady tropes, There is also a liberal use of Corporate Drones and Kleenex disposable thin paper characters, Women characters did not fare as well as men in this story, ELOPe should be a character too, but it was ominously faceless,

The story is set in a conflation of Microsoft and Googlelike megatech corps, but mostly Google circa.
Oddly, while the author is willing to name drop on small firms, megatech firms are obfuscated,

The plot reminded me of a mashup of The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the more mundane Deus Est Machina A.
I. trope. Although today, the world will likely be donein by Twitter and not email domination,

Plot holes abound, Accounts payable is the only reliable software application, Its hard to hack double entry accounting tech, The defenders of humanity spend chapter's following the money to spy on ELOPe's activities, Why do they miss the single most, crucial, large, peculiar, and late expenditure Where did the tens of millions of dollars likely spent by the Emergency Team to delouse the Avogadro network come from between Leonov's couch cushions Finally, in the paperless Avogadro, where do Keyes' printouts come from

In addition, the plotting and narration had that neutered for a YA rating feel about it.
For example, nobody takes time out to have sex, uses profanity, binge drinks microbrew or takes any drugs stronger than gourmet coffee,

I take issue with plotting of this story the most, It is obvious to me the author hadpages, maybe more in mind when he started writing, The series is fourpage books, About a third of the way into this story, it stops being Geeklit and takes on the aspect of mega Techno, or maybe CyberThriller.
It becomes Thunderball the OtT film, not the novel, The story eventually spans the globe, It includes: helicopterborne BlackOps , explosions, ships sinking, aircraft crashing, corporate perfidity, etc, . The book is then left ending at an awkward point dictated more by page count than a natural breakpoint, A long Epilogue follows that setsup for the next book with Ryan, You need a hook for the nextmore pages in three more books, Frankly, the book would have been better as a much smaller story and not the magnum opus TechnoThriller it tries to be,

I don't have the time for reading a story that disappoints, I wont be reading the next in the series sitelinkA, I. Apocalypse.

Readers looking for a better A, Il. story might try sitelinkThe Lifecycle of Software Objects, .