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Kindle Notes & Highlights
As with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Michael Crichton was issuing a warning through the medium of popular fiction.
Wars are not fought by computers or genetically engineered autonomous machines. Not yet, anyway.
The National Security Act of 1947 changed the Department of War to the National Military Establishment, which was then renamed the more innocuous Department of Defense in 1949. Ironically, since its renaming, the National Military Establishment has been less about defense and more about war.
The World Economic Forum tells us we are on the verge of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. Klaus Schwab, its founder and executive chairman, writes that the next Industrial Revolution “is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity,
governments will gain new technological powers to increase their control over populations, based on pervasive surveillance systems and the ability to control digital infrastructure.”
We would be wise to remember that a society’s primary organizing principle is its monopoly on force, its ability to control its populace and export violence in the form of war.
None of the geopolitics matter when you are looking down the glass against an enemy doing the same, and it is not always the best man who walks away.
Though this book certainly focuses on the rapidly expanding role of technology in conflict, at its base this is a story about loyalty.
The distinction between war and peace, combatant and noncombatant, and even violence and nonviolence (think cyberwarfare) is becoming uncomfortably blurry.”
He had participated in enough war games and classified briefings over the years to know that his submarine’s actions would be coordinated with other subsurface platforms tasked with launching missiles at Alaska, California, Washington State, and Guam.
Reece had known pain. Was it possible for him to move on? Had he forgiven himself? Had a new chapter finally begun for them both?
Reece and Raife had started construction on their archery–bookstore–coffee shop–whiskey bar concept in Whitefish. The owner of Glacier Archery had retired and sold it to the two former frogmen.
Use the time you have, James. When you put down the gun, walk away. Don’t live in the past. Love your wife. Raise your kids. And don’t look back. Treasure each moment, because once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.
“Can you define ‘current military ambitions’ in more detail?” Christine asked. “No more than you can define the ambitions of NATO,” Xu responded.
Always sprint to the finish, his dad’s voice reminded him. Not just to the finish but through the finish. And not just in this race, but in life.
Lauren and Lucy stood on the opposite side of the bed, illuminated by the pixels from the monitors and screens helping keep Katie alive. Lauren wore one of Reece’s old SEAL platoon ball caps, her blond ponytail pulled through the back. Her arm was around their daughter, who was barely tall enough to see over the bed. “Mom, I want see Daddy,” she said. Lauren leaned over and picked Lucy up, holding the child on her hip. The little girl smiled at her dad and then gazed down at Katie. She then pulled her mom’s head close and said something Reece couldn’t quite make out into her mother’s ear.
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“Do not underestimate the power of their military-industrial complex—their thirst for war,” Yun said. “Remember the Gulf of Tonkin and WMD in Iraq. America has a history not just of miscalculation in foreign affairs but of deliberate lies to their people and the world with the goal of intervention for profit.”
“I feel like this comes back to the could/should dilemma. Haven’t these guys read Frankenstein or Jurassic Park?”
“Man and nature have always been in conflict, Reece.” “The more we try to control it, the more it warns us to back off.”
‘One man with a rifle can change the world.’ ”
“Hart is a prodigy of sorts, a tech genius for lack of a better term. His parents are killed and later in life he finds out the CIA was responsible. At the same time, he is witnessing what he sees as the destruction of his country by his own class—tech giants and corporations. He sees a future in which freedom isn’t just curtailed but is essentially nonexistent for the ‘good of the people’ because of climate change or something along those lines. He develops a technology that allows his company’s AI quantum computer to rival Alice but has developed it in a way that even Alice can’t access or
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Great Cliff Notes for the entire background of the plot. Really appreciate it
China has wanted Taiwan back since Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists fled there in 1949.
Even after lifting the one-child policy eight years ago, their birth rate has dropped by seventy percent.”
China is in their final decade as an economic power. There is nothing they can do to stop it.”
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Political power was not just attractive for the corruptible. In truth they were corrupt and morally bankrupt from the start.
“We first take a needle and catheter and insert it into the corner of your eye socket. We then extract the needle, leaving the catheter in place, and attach it to an IV saline solution. The pressure of the solution behind the eye is one of the more painful things a human can experience.” “I’ll remember that,” Reece said. “Eventually the eye pops out,” Jin continued. “But that in and of itself is not enough, even when combined with random beatings, daily sexual abuse, and genital mutilation.
This is grotesque 👀
feet before the ten-count reached its apex. Any referee in the world of boxing would have called it a knockout, but this was not a bout. This was war, not a war between nation-states or even proxies or factions in which industrialized nations adhered to a set of rules or principles.
