Category Archives: science fiction

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When David Walton asked me to read a draft of his novel THREE LAWS LETHAL, I said yes without hesitation. The mixture of self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and tech start-ups was obviously right up my alley.

I was even more delighted when I read the draft, and found a compelling, thoughtful, and philosophical science fiction thriller about what it means for AI to be alive. While reading I frequently stopped to screenshot passages I loved to send them back to David.

I’ve been waiting excitedly for this book to become available, and now it is. Buy a copy today — you’ll love it.

I asked David to write a guest post for my blog, which you’ll find below.

How might an AI develop consciousness?

It might be the most important question on the modern philosopher’s unanswered list, and it’s certainly the most fascinating. Will Hertling proposed one possible avenue in AVOGADRO CORP: through algorithms developed to improve human communication. In my new novel THREE LAWS LETHAL, I do it through self-driving cars.

We all know self-driving cars are coming; it’s just a matter of how many problems we manage to trip over on the way there. THREE LAWS LETHAL embraces this future in all of its glory: the life-and-death choices of the Trolley Problem, lawsuits and human fault, open source vs. copyright, the threat of hacking, and government regulation.  But all that is just a warm-up for the main event: the development of a conscious artificial mind.

How does a mind develop? The same way it always has: through evolution.

Naomi Sumner, programmer extraordinaire, creates a virtual world to train AIs. Those who perform well in the game world survive, allowing them to reproduce — spawn new AIs similar to themselves. As thousands of generations pass, the AIs not only become incredibly good at the self-driving game, they also develop some surprising emergent behavior, like circumventing the limits on their memory footprint.

They’re very smart, but still not conscious. A few more steps are required to reach that point, steps none of the characters anticipate or plan for. Ultimately, it is the training world itself that becomes self-aware, and all the AI actors inside it are merely elements of its psyche.

But every invention in history, sooner or later, is turned into a weapon. UAVs, drones, and missiles can benefit from self-driving technology as well, especially when trained through war-simulation game play. So what happens when part of this infant conscious mind is partitioned off and trained to kill?

You’ll have to read THREE LAWS LETHAL to find out…

—

David Walton is a software engineer with Lockheed Martin by day and the father of eight children by night. Since he doesn’t have time to write novels, he trained a world full of AIs to do it for him.

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I’ll be at the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, Colorado next week, from April 9th to 13th. I’ll be speaking on topics including artificial intelligence, social media, data ownership and privacy, writing science fiction, and the role of science fiction in technological progress.

If you’ll be at CWA or in Boulder, and would like to meet up, chat, or get a book signed, please reach out to me. You can find me on twitter as @hertling, or by email at william dot hertling at gmail dot com.

 

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I have good news about the Kill Switch release!

It’s been two years since Kill Process was released. Kill Switch was a daunting book to write. It’s 20% longer than Kill Process, which, when it was released, was the longest novel I’d written by far. Kill Switch also tackles new topics that required more research and finesse to handle properly. And while writing this novel, I also bought a house, moved, tackled house projects, switched roles at my day job, and more.

So it is with both excitement and relief that I’m thrilled to finally announce that Kill Switch will be released in October. The proofreading is done. The final formatting is done. The audiobook is nearly complete. The cover design is done. I will have a firm launch date within a week or two.

As usual, Patreon backers will be the first to receive Kill Switch, and they should receive their ebooks the first weekend in October, and the paperback prior to the official launch.

Thank you so much for your patience! I’m delighted to get Kill Switch into everyone’s hands.

The new cover was designed by Jenn Reese, who did a wonderful job. Thank you Jenn!

Kill Switch by William Hertling

Kill Switch Cover

 

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How does it affect time travel if you start with the assumption that reality as we know it is a computer simulation?

In this case, time travel has nothing to do with physics, and everything to do with software simulations.

Time travel backward would require that the program saves all previous states (or at least checkpoints at fine enough granularity to make it useful enough for time traveling) and the ability to insert logic and data from the present into states of the program in the past. Seems feasible.

Time travel forward would consist of removing the time traveling person from the program, running the program forward until reaching the future destination, then reinserting the person.

Forward time travel is relatively cheap (because you’d be running the program forward anyhow), but backward time travel is expensive because you keep having to roll the universe back, slowing the forward progress of time. In fact, one person could do a denial of service attack on reality simply by continually traveling to the distant past. Then, every time you come back, you would have to immediately return to the past.

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Cover of Kill Process by William HertlingGoodreads Choice is one of the few completely reader driven book awards.

Kill Process was not part of the initial ballot, but thanks to enthusiastic write-in votes, it has made it to the semifinal round! Thank you so much to everyone who voted during the initial round.

Now that Kill Process is on the ballot during this semifinal round, I hope you’ll consider voting for it. (Even if you voted for it during the initial voting round, I think you need to vote again.)

Vote here:
https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-science-fiction-books-2016

 

 

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When I finish a novel, I always need a break from writing for a while to recharge. Sometimes I take a break from long-form writing and do a series of short blog posts, or sometimes I bury myself in programming for a while.

This time around, it’s been a little of everything: My day job has been busy. I’ve done a few small programming projects on the side. I’m networking with film and TV folks in the hopes of getting a screen adaptation for one of my books. And I’m researching topics for my next book.

In the last couple of months, I’ve experimented with different ideas for my next book. I have about 10,000 words written — that’s about 10% of the average length of one of my books. I don’t want to say too much more, because it’s so early in the process that it could go in almost any possible direction. But I have general ideas I want to explore, and a tentative story arc.

That’s usually enough for me to get going. I’m not a big outliner, even though plenty of writers swear by the process. I tried outlining a novel once and learned that once I had finished the outline and knew how the story ended, I had no interest in actually writing it. Now I stick to a loose story arc, and let my characters take me where they want to go.

I will find out more about their destination in the coming month. November is NaNoWriMo. If you are not familiar with it, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, in which people aim to write a 50,000 word novel in one month. I’ve never written a whole novel in November, but I often like to use the month to build momentum, so I’ve set myself a modest word count goal for this November. It should be enough to prove out many of the concepts I’m planning for the book.

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Kill Process Cover

I’m excited to announce that my new novel, Kill Process, is now available!

Here’s where you can get it right now:

More storefronts, such as iBooks and Barnes & Noble, will be available in the coming days. I’m also very happy to announce that, thanks to in part to fast work from Brick Shop Audio, the audio book edition is already available!

The concept:

By day, Angie, a twenty-year veteran of the tech industry, is a data analyst at Tomo, the world’s largest social networking company; by night, she exploits her database access to profile domestic abusers and kill the worst of them. She can’t change her own traumatic past, but she can save other women.

When Tomo introduces a deceptive new product that preys on users’ fears to drive up its own revenue, Angie sees Tomo for what it really is—another evil abuser. Using her coding and hacking expertise, she decides to destroy Tomo by building a new social network that is completely distributed, compartmentalized, and unstoppable. If she succeeds, it will be the end of all centralized power in the Internet.

But how can an anti-social, one-armed programmer with too many dark secrets succeed when the world’s largest tech company is out to crush her and a no-name government black ops agency sets a psychopath to look into her growing digital footprint?

A few of the early endorsements:

“Awesome, thrilling, and creepy: a fast-paced portrayal of the startup world, and the perils of our personal data and technical infrastructure in the wrong hands.”
—Brad Feld, managing director of Foundry Group

“His most ambitious work yet. A murder thriller about high tech surveillance and espionage in the startup world. Like the best of Tom Clancy and Barry Eisner.”
—Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project

“Explores the creation and effects of the templated self, the rise of structured identity and one-size-fits-all media culture, and feasible alternatives.”
—Amber Case, author of Calm Technology

I hope you have a blast reading Kill Process. I certainly enjoyed writing it.
— Will

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ChildrenOfArkadiaI read Children of Arkadia, by Darusha Wehm, over the weekend. This was a fascinating book. The setting is a classic of science fiction: a bunch of idealistic settlers embark on creating an idealized society in a space station colony. There are two unique twists: the artificial general intelligences that accompany them have, in theory, equal rights and free will as the humans. There are no antagonists: no one is out to sabotage society, there’s no evil villain. Just circumstances.

Darusha does an excellent job exploring some of the obvious and not-so-obvious conflicts that emerge. Can an all-knowing, super intelligence AI ever really be on equal footing with humans? How does work get done in a post-scarcity economy? Can even the best-intentioned people armed with powerful and helpful technology ever create a true utopia?

Children of Arkadia manages to explore all this and give us interesting and diverse characters in a compact, fun to read story. Recommended.

 

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The Turing Exception, book four in the Singularity series, is now available from Audible and iTunes. Narrated by Jane Cramer, this unabridged audio version of The Turing Exception completes the Singularity series.

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.

Everything changes when a runaway nanotech event leads to the destruction of Miami. In the grim aftermath, a powerful underground collective known as XOR concludes that AI can no longer coexist with humanity.

AI pioneers Catherine Matthews, Leon Tsarev, and Mike Williams believe that mere months are left before XOR starts an extermination war. Can they find a solution before time runs out?

I hope you enjoy it!

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Google announced a new analytical AI that analyzes emails to determine their content, then proposes a list of short likely replies for the user to pick from. It’s not exactly ELOPe, but definitely getting closer all the time.

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