Which of his books were pioneering or futuristic in how they showed people using computers ?
The book is kind of about that, but also about technology. It was published in 1994 and I would say it was futuristic, if not a bit misguided.
Crichton envisioned a virtual reality tool where -- if you wanted to find a certain file on your computer -- you would run down the halls of a huge virtual library, opening virtual filing cabinets and picking through files by hand. I think this was supposed to make finding your digital files "easier"... but seems hilarious now.
Who knows, maybe some version of that will still come true. It's been a while since I read it, so I might be mis-remembering.
Almost all of his books had some futuristic technology involved, including Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Timeline, etc.
I don't remember much about the plot, but can't ever forget that VR. <curmudgeon>The trends in "expressive" animated interface design make me think that dystopian future is still an aspiration for some designers. Just as soon as we all get headsets...</curmudgeon>
We might not have to traverse miles of virtual hallways, but a lot of designers still seem to prefer to make us flick our fingers a lot. Each of us probably scrolls through hundreds of feet of virtual space every day. Before long, we'll probably begin to hear about whatever the index finger equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome is.
But at least we don't have to swing our arms in midair for 8 hours a day like the poor folks in Minority Report.
Among other important uses:
* the widespread use of computers for nearly complete automation of the park--maintaining feeds (to a certain extent), automatically delivering medicine, etc. These systems were buggy, but it was a major early demonstration of how computers could be used to automate out many jobs.
* Think the Internet-of-Things but for tracking hundreds of dinosaurs in xyzt space around the park using image recognition from hundreds of distributed sensors/cameras around the park.
* They had several Cray XP supercomputers in order to help with DNA sequencing.
* Ian Malcolm studied chaos theory--a field that is reliant on numerical simulations (rather than pure pen-and-paper calculation).
As a slight spoiler to the book: human hubris in building incredibly complex biological systems under the control of relatively simple technological systems is what led to the downfall of the park.
Also, the Gunslinger vision https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jCDQvNh85Y mentioned in the article isn't just the first use of CGI in a feature film, it's surely also a very early, for all I know maybe the first, attempt to show the "first-person view" Umwelt of an artificially intelligent robot.
"The book features relatively new advances in the computing/scientific community, such as artificial life, emergence (and by extension, complexity), genetic algorithms, and agent-based computing."
That'd be like saying Dolly the Sheep was pioneering in ideas about cloning humans. The ideas/ethics/concerns were around for decades. That average people willfully ignored them doesn't make the ideas new.