What I am reading

As my latest readings probably reflect quite strongly, I am currently on the lookout for contemporary writings on robots/cyborgs/androids and AI due to this being the focus of my work-in-progress-master-thesis in comparative literature.

So, Hologrammatica is a detective story (the nightmare of a cover calls it a “thriller“) about our world at the end of the 21st century (2088 to be exact). By this time the so called Holonet is everywhere, which is best explained as five different levels of three dimensional holographics which are superimposed onto the real world (including advertisements, different textures on buildings and garments, alterations of appearance and so on).

While technologically advanced in this way, mankind has learned from a “little“ AI incident in the past when an AI, which was built to solve our problems with climate change, went a little skiwompous and the whole technological infrastructure had to be shut down for weeks in order to deal with this rogue AI. Since then, it is strictly forbidden to develop any “intelligent“ software and also privacy and personal data are heavily protected. Well, there wouldn’t be a story if it was like that..

In short, it is the story of a detective, hired to find a programmer who disappeared. While I am usually not a big fan of detective stories, I found the story enjoyable. Predictable from time to time, but overall entertaining.