Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
November/December 2003
Book Review: Prey
by Richard Mateosian
Senior Member, Berkeley Chapter
Prey by Michael Crichton (Harper Collins, NY, 2002, ISBN 0-06-621412-2, $26.95)
In
this novel, Michael Crichton, already famous for his earlier works, The
Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, places current technologies
into a completely plausible situation, then develops the story into an
engrossing thriller. Somewhere in the process he crosses the line from
believable to unbelievable. I'm not sure of the exact point in the book
when I started to feel that way, but by the time I did, I was already
hooked.
Synopsis
Forman, fired for blowing the whistle on questionable corporate accounting practices, has been an unemployed househusband for many months when his former company calls him to consult. They have sold Forman's software to another company, which is having trouble with it. The new company, it turns out, is Xymos, the firm for which Forman's wife is a marketing director. She looks at Xymos as her last chance to make a fortune, and she has cut a few corners to bring the story to this point. She should have read some of the project management books that I reviewed recently in this column. They could have saved her a lot of trouble, but then there would be no story.
Forman heads for the remote desert facility where the problem is, and he finds that Xymos has used agent software that Forman's team had developed at the first company. The software produces agents that exhibit predator–prey behavior, but Xymos has put the agents to another use—a military contract to create a spy camera made from a swarm of billions of nanomachines.
Unable to solve the problem of how to prevent air currents from disrupting
the swarm's structure, Xymos has turned swarms loose in the desert to
see if a solution emerges as they evolve. Through a series of plausible
circumstances, the swarms can use solar power and already carry with them
their means of manufacture when Xymos turns them loose. They multiply
and evolve at a rapid rate. Adaptive behaviors emerge. Humans become their
prey, and it looks as if they have a good chance of wiping us out. From
this point, the novelist takes over and carries the story forward to its
conclusion.
Added Suspense
Prey reminds me of a book that was one of my favorites when I was an avid science fiction fan, about 50 years ago. In Hal Clement’s novel Needle, two members of an alien race come to Earth—one a fugitive and one a pursuing police officer. Members of this alien race live by symbiosis, a relationship in which they and their hosts help but never harm each other. The fugitive has violated this rule. This contributes to the danger that leads to the book's exciting conclusion. In Prey, one strain of the evolving swarms of nanomachines develops a behavior much like symbiosis, contributing added suspense to the climax.
Familiar Concepts Explored
When I read Prey, I thought of many books I have read and concepts that I have explored over the years.
Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained talks about the parallel architecture that the billions of neurons of the brain have organized themselves into. Adaptive self-organizing systems are at least as ancient as humans, but we have only begun to understand such systems in the last decade or so. Prey reminds us that humans are not necessarily the only creatures capable of pursuing their own goals powerfully and efficiently, to the detriment of their fellow Earthlings.
Mitchel Resnick, in Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams—Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds, says that no leader directs birds to fly in formation or ants to form trails from their nests to food sources. Instead, large numbers of independent entities, each following simple rules, produce the large-scale patterns that we observe. This is the principle that makes Crichton's Prey plausible.
In Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence, author George Dyson tries to understand many of the themes that underlie Prey. He starts with the work of Thomas Hobbes, over 350 years ago. Hobbes' Leviathan is a group intelligence representing the future of human society. Hobbes believed that life arises from the physical behavior of the underlying objects. The parts of the body give rise to a person whose life and thought are of a higher order than those of its heart, nerves, or muscles. Similarly, people, their institutions, and their machines give rise to a group intelligence of even higher order. This, of course, is what happens with the swarms of nanomachines in Prey.
In the April 2000 issue of Wired, Bill Joy discusses three technologies
in which our progress is outpacing our ability to control them: genetics,
nanotechnology, and robotics. He calls attention to some of the possible
consequences of these technologies: plague, intelligent germ warfare,
out-of-control self-replicating robots, and many others. Michael Crichton
relies heavily on all three of these technologies, and on some of the
possible consequences Joy calls attention to, to create the nightmare
scenario in Prey.
Highly Recommended
Prey is an enthralling thriller,
but it is also an elaboration of many threads of thought in computer science
and in the ethics of science. I highly recommend it.
This review originally appeared in slightly different
form in the May/June 2003 issue of IEEE Micro.
© Copyright 2003 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
All rights reserved.
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