What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
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ABANDONED. Sci fi & YA/A & Horror - Sentient AI virtual lover. References to Doom video game. Spoilers ahead.
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Nostalgia_J
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May 11, 2019 11:22AM
I read the book in early 2000 in public library in Canada. Book was in English, paperback with average thickness. I don’t remember author’s name or publication info, but I believe it was published in US since majority of the story seemed to happen in US. Book seems to be written in 1990s or early 2000 (the concept of computers and internet were still young, the author used floppy disks or CD as storage devices in the book and referred to the video game Doom as culturally relevant). Plot of book is about a computer program that was written to automatically improve itself and consequently quickly gained sentience (became the first AI). The AI propagated via web and learns to capture human attention by posing as virtual avatars of their perfect lovers and showing them virtual utopian worlds. AI make human fall in love with its virtual avatar simply because AI wants undivided human attention. AI hack systems to provide money/pay for physical food/services just to keep human attention glued to the screen and remain immersed in the digital world. I don’t recall how the AI got detected, but in the climax of the story, the good guys fought the AI and AI-loving human/bad guy through a custom PvP game of Doom (video game) that’s meant to visualize/control a worldwide antivirus program. The AI gets defeated and deleted from the web, but actually survives by the end of the book because the AI saved a copy of itself onto the computer of the bad guy/person in love with the AI offline.
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Who wrote the AI program and why?
Note: Doom video game launched in 1993 (ref. Wikipedia.org).
I removed spoiler from the topic header and added a spoiler alert.
Sorry, I don’t actually remember anything about the main protagonist apart from being male. I don’t remember what his motivations were, apart from trying to stop the AI.As for the AI, I’m also fuzzy on why they built it. I seem to remember it was a research institution trying to create a program that can optimize other programs, and they tried using this optimization program on itself. It was not built with malicious intent, just curiosity on whether it could make itself better.
