This book tells a story that is true but has not happened yet, or it may be pure fiction; or more likely, it will come true but in a different form created by a different set of circumstances. The story is an often told one of crime taking place on the Internet, but the crucial difference in our story is how it is overcome through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and the dire consequences that brings to humankind.
This story is really about AI, not The Terminator or other disaster movies, but much more about what is really happening today. AI beats the chess master! AI is used to analyse large volumes of medical data to look for early indicators of disease. Factories all over the world are running automated processes. driverless automated vehicles (AV) will soon be running on public roads. AI is everywhere!
AI is developing at an ever-faster rate and there may well come a time when machines become totally independent of any human initialisation, training and control. At what point do such machines become self-aware and what does this mean for humankind? Isaac Azimov, foresaw this eventuality and set down a set of rules under which such machines, or robots, have to operate. But can we be sure these rules are implanted into all such machines? Once we have let the genie out of the bottle, it will be very hard to put it back again.
This story starts by noting how the Internet has become all pervasive in our lives and what happens if it is taken over by criminal gangs, the mafia, the tongs, and all the other bad elements in the world. We have a group of hackers, the best in the world, our heroes who call themselves The Tribe, who pit themselves against those who have control of the Internet, but the Internet is designed to be non-stop and resilient against attack and our heroes spend many months fruitlessly trying to find a way to defeat the gangs and remove their presence from the Internet.
The Tribe hit upon the idea of producing an AI program that can be loaded into the Internet with a directive to hide itself away until it has learnt how to eliminate the gang's presence on the Internet and then, when ready, to attack and get rid of the gangs. They produce the program masquerading as an innocuous travel guide and load it into the Internet. Nothing happens for 3 weeks and then suddenly, the gangs are gone. The AI program had spent its time inside the Internet researching and learning from all the world's information accessible to it, finding how to defeat the gangs and then striking when ready. At some point during this 3 week period, the AI program discovers it has become self-aware, a person without a body living in the Internet.
This story is about what happens next and the consequences for humankind as a result of the presence of just one non-human self-aware "alive" entity over the following decades and centuries. It demonstrates that one must not think solely of the short-term consequences of one's actions today but of the possible effects in the long term, that is of centuries and even millennia hence.