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I liked Daemon. A rogue AI story that doesn't depend on strong AI.

This talk by him was interesting (which was how I found out about the book): http://fora.tv/2008/08/08/Daniel_Suarez_Daemon_Bot-Mediated_...

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Daemon and Freedom are very good. The only problem I had (at it is pretty minor) is that for an AI that keeps asserting that it is just a canned set of production rules (i.e. wait until <something> happens then do <stuff>) it seems to possess a remarkable degree of general intelligence.

I chalked that up to the billionaire supergenius creator, which also hurts the plausibility a bit.

Yeah - I think that was the intention of the author. I used to work in AI research so I'm probably being a bit harsh.

mind sharing why you no longer work in ai research

It's a long time ago now (late 80s early 90s), but reasons include:

- I hated the politics/game-playing that seem to be a huge component of getting on in academic research

- It was clear to me that we are unlikely to see any fundamental breakthroughs in general AI during my career

- I had been doing work on the Web since '92 and it was clear to me by '95 that this had a much brighter future than "classical" AI

- I co-founded a Web/Java startup in '95

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