JULIAN MARSHALL, a computer scientist, had an epiphany while growing up in Lake City, South Carolina. One word crystallized Julian’s ultimate goal: superintelligence. He thought, “Inevitably, a self-improving machine intelligence was coming to the world, and it was crucial for it to be guided by humans to a safe harbor.” Later his MIT Ph.D. qualified him to do this. He eventually joined the UC Berkeley Computer Science Department and became a full professor. Julian formed a team to be the first to program a supercomputer that was superior to human intelligence when the announcement of the Singularity Prize was made. The novel follows the character arc of JULIAN.
Julian viewed the world in 2030 as teeming with problems that threaten human survival. The specter of adverse climate change, resource depletion, energy deficits, poverty, epidemic disease, political and religious strife, warfare, and famine hang over humanity like the sword of Damocles. Parallel to this reality, accelerating technological change and the educational awakening presented a positive trend in global development and human affairs.
ELLISON MCCLINTOCK, a billionaire hedge fund manager, announced the thirty-billion-dollar Singularity Prize in New York. The Singularity represented the intelligence explosion that could forever change humanity and usher in a new era. The risk of an unfriendly intelligence was an existential threat. The stringent rules on safety resulted in only two teams qualifying to pursue the prize, Julian’s team at Berkeley and a team in Beijing led by a Chinese lady, XEUJING WANG. The Singularity Prize rules required each competing team to program a recursively self-improving machine intelligence with embedded ethical codes to ensure a safe Singularity. Julian had an affair with a neuroscience grad student on campus who betrayed him by stealing classified AI programming code and getting it transmitted to Karastan, a small central Asian country. His wife threatened divorce. One of the Chinese programmers on the Berkeley team defected to the Beijing team with key blocks of code that were stolen from the Americans. An argument erupted within the Berkeley-Stanford-Cape Town consortium over the need to reverse engineer the human brain to ensure safety.
In Karastan, a third group competed for reaching the Singularity covertly to further the global power of their government. After stealing codes from abroad, their team of hackers was deployed to provoke cyber warfare and nuclear terrorism against western countries. Cyber warfare erupted when these covert operatives attacked and crippled the electric power grid in several countries including the USA. Near economic collapse and chaos ensued, provoking global panic and mass civil unrest. The Soldiers of the Cause, a non-state terrorist group, acquired a suitcase nuke with its codes and threatened London with a nuclear explosion. The US and western leaders along with the UN requested help from the two teams pursuing the Singularity Prize to divert their energies to the cyber warfare crisis. The race was on to reach the Singularity, now needed to save civilization from these reprehensible forces of destruction.
The long arm of the deep past extends to 2030 to ideas of intelligence and survival. Seventy-four thousand years ago, the Great Toba volcanic eruption in the Pacific created a survival bottleneck. Early humans on the East African plains dropped to only 1000 breeding pairs as a result of a long, freezing, volcanic winter where photosynthesis was shut down by ash clouds in the upper atmosphere. This collapsed the food chain. ARION boldly led one small clan of humans that were threatened with extinction during the Toba Event out of Africa to populate the world. Both in 2030 and in ancient times, improving intelligence was the key to any hope of survival. A world of chaos and conflict or one with unlimited promise hung in the balance. Which team will win The Singularity Prize ushering in a new era of a more intelligent, ethical, and wise human-super AI partnership?