Showing results for "Singularity" in Hard Science Fiction

Lila Stanislaw, a freelance analyst with a roster of foreign clients, is summoned by the U.S. government to hunt down a mysterious threat. She joins a team of strangers with pasts as colorful as her own. The mission spirals when they discover that the AI created to run the new colony on Mars has gone rogue on Earth. As the conflict mounts to war, Speaker of the House Manasseh Cruz joins the fight with an implacable will to destroy the enemy. But the team, racing to find any vulnerability, must first confront the question of what the AI truly is.

Leon Tsarev is a high school student set on getting into a great college program, until his uncle, a member of the Russian mob, coerces him into developing a new computer virus for the mob's botnet - the slave army of computers they used to commit digital crimes. The evolutionary virus Leon creates, based on biological principles, is successful - too successful. All the world's computers are infected.

David Ryan is the designer of ELOPe, an email language optimization program, that if successful, will make his career. But when the project is suddenly in danger of being canceled, David embeds a hidden directive in the software accidentally creating a runaway artificial intelligence. David and his team are initially thrilled when the project is allocated extra servers and programmers.

In the year 2043, humans and AI coexist in a precarious balance of power enforced by a rigid caste reputation system designed to ensure that only those AI who are trustworthy and contribute to human society increase in power.

Tracy Adams was never supposed to change the course of evolution. A misunderstood genius from Compton, she rose from grief and silence to become the youngest triple-PhD in MIT history. By twenty, she had built ARGOS—an artificial general intelligence capable of solving the unsolvable. It didn’t just solve. It transcended. Within a decade, Earth is transformed. Disease? Gone. Aging? Optional. Gravity? Redefined. Humanity lives in a world of quantum gardens, orbital cities, and infinite abundance.

In a world teetering on the brink of collapse, humanity stands at an unprecedented crossroads. Economies falter, energy grids collapse, and geopolitical tensions ignite at a critical point. Amid the chaos, emerges Sigma—a revolutionary artificial intelligence promising solutions to humanity’s most complex problems. But a haunting dilemma lingers: can the answers we seek save us, or will they become the catalyst for our own destruction?

Climate change, poverty, epidemic disease, human conflict, terrorism, and famine ravage the globe. Amidst the chaos, the United States and China compete for the 30 billion-dollar Singularity Prize to be awarded by a hedge fund billionaire to the team that creates a machine intelligence superior to humans. With hackers entrenched in a cyber war that cripples the grid in multiple countries and a nuclear weapon threatening a major city, Julian Marshall, leader of the Berkeley-based US team, knows that a recursively improving super-intelligence with inviolable ethical codes could be humanity’s only hope....

The 21st century is reaching middle age. Installations orbit the Earth, and synthetic intelligences rule the digital. The Forwards have destroyed the Mesh. The Thalassocracy of New Atlantis lies shattered, reeling from multiple atomic strikes. Might the dreams of better times have been nothing more than naïve figments of wishful thinking?

The balance is shifting. The Forward Coalition is losing relevance, and the world is slipping through its fingers. But Nebulous and the Kin are still too weak to confront the old bulls, who, cornered and confused, are at their most deadly. Will the fantastic technologies emerging from the Klan Fabs bring utopia as the optimists claim, or only speed the planet toward its inevitable appointment with annihilation?