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This Perfect Day, by Ira Levin. Story of a man's repeated attempts to escape a benevolent automated dictatorship where everything is controlled and everyone is
by drak0n1c 7y ago
This Perfect Day, by Ira Levin. Story of a man's repeated attempts to escape a benevolent automated dictatorship where everything is controlled and everyone is kept sedated.
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein - The moon is a colony of misfits and is suffering increasingly unreasonable demands from earth (1776 in space). One of the computer systems managing part of the colony is discovered to be sentient and is gradually befriended by a sysadmin.
- berbec 7y agoA hearty second for this Heinlein treasure. A better read you won't find. Skip the "sequels" where he ties in Lazerus Long in...
- mcguire 7y agoNote: Thpoilerth. I would disagree wih The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The sentient computer just appears, solves the problem facing the Lunar residents, and disappears. Heinlein never explores any of the implications of a "sentient computer", how it just shows up, or what the effects following the Lunar revolution would be.
- CobrastanJorji 7y agoHe hypothesizes about it briefly. You're lead to believe that consciousness is an rare but possible emergent behavior of a system, given sufficient capacity. For example, from chapter 1 -- "Human brain has around ten-to-the-tenth neurons. By third year Mike had better than one and a half times that number of neuristors. And woke up." But yes, I agree that generally the story is not about computer technology. Science in general is very important to the plot, but not computer science.