The novel comes to us as a "thriller of evolution and artificial intelligence." Paying attention to this characterization is especially important because both authors are already well established in their fields and may draw their separate audiences to the work. The Turing Option is a collaboration in which both have made some adjustments, possibly even some compromises, to conclude the joint project. Let us focus on three dimensions as primary for placing the book in the space of contemporary fiction, then turn to the issue of what is its central novelty and most profound interest.
The first author is Harrison, appropriately so because the novel is a mystery, a dimension closer to his concerns and practice than to Minsky's. Though not so fast-paced as Harrison's popular "Stainless Steel Rat" novels, the book moves right along and gets better and better, with a credible series of complications. It would easily be finished in a weekend by an engaged reader. The denouement is both appropriate and novel.
The book is more one of unfettered scientific imagination than adventurous fantasy. The time of action is 2023. The technologies and ideas are rational extensions of existing ideas and technologies. We hear, for example, that a certain computer employed is a "Connection Machine-10;" one assumes it is about as far advanced beyond today's parallel CM-5 (with that machine's possible 64k nodes of sparc chips, each with its optional quadruple vector processors), as the CM-5 is beyond the Apple II. Within this framework, and especially given Minsky's expertise in Artificial Intelligence and Nanotechnology, the leap of faith required to follow the changes and developments of the main characters is manageable.
A third dimension, relatively unusual in this genre, is an intention that is both didactic and inspirational. The Turing Option sets out a suite of ideas and tries to engage a non-technical community with the value and interest of those ideas. The novel could be ahead of its time. Neither AI nor nanotechnology is so well known to today's audience as each will be. The novel will help in that popularization. Personally, I find the well articulated vision of the interplay between AI and nanotechnology to be the single most remarkable aspect of The Turing Option. By itself, it justifies purchase of the book.
As a teacher, I would be happy to use The Turing Option in introducing my students to Minsky's ideas, as represented by his popular book The Society of Mind. If I were introducing The Society of Mind ideas to junior students, of high school age for example, I would recommend they start with The Turing Option. This book has something lacking in The Society of Mind -- simple organization and flow -- derived from the mystery story structure. If I were using The Society of Mind in a college course, I would ask students to read both books but would leave the choice to them of which to read first. Each is useful in understanding the other.
A distinguished precursor to the Harrison/Minsky effort is Frederick Pohl's Man Plus. In that novella, Pohl expands on the implications of the neurophysiological studies of McCulloch and Lettvin (and other contributors in studies of the Frog's Eye and Brain, Maturana, Pitts, and Selfridge) to inquire what it means to be human when the mechanisms and processes of perceptual sense-making are replaced by manufactured artifacts. Harrison has woven a story on a similar theme around Minsky's theory of mind. Pohl's man is adapted by surgery to live on the surface of Mars; he is made into a "Cyborg" -- a cybernetic organism. In the interplay of exposition and story, a reader gradually sees Pohl's man change piece by painful piece into something else. The mystery story in Pohl's novella is muted throughout but provides the dramatic sense of "fated" rightness at the story's conclusion. Here is a similar balance of ideas and their scaffold, another mystery story, though the ideas underlying The Turing Option represent generations of advance over those of Minsky's scientific predecessors. Pohl's work is touching, concrete, and rooted in our common bodily nature and its explicit alteration. I find Pohl's work, like tragedy, both painful and illuminating.
The core story of The Turing Option is that of a young computer scientist, Brian Delaney, who takes a round in the brain when industrial thieves steal the first working artificial intelligence, one based on breakthroughs in his work. Brian doesn't die. One of his colleagues, a neurophysiologist, repairs his brain by patching up the matter and implanting therein a small but powerful parallel computer, the CM-10. In Man Plus by Pohl, we see the story of one human being incrementally transformed into a cybernetic organism by a series of operations, in preparation for an externally established goal. In The Turing Option, we see a human mind, reduced to a damaged shard of mind, then presented as a mind under self-reconstruction piece-meal, with the embedded CM-10 as a part of its resources for development and function. These developments serve as the raison d'tre for explanations of some of Minsky's theories. They lead also to insights through which Brian can continue and then succeed in producing an effective Artificial Intelligence, named Sven. The path of incremental development is there, both for the sake of explanation and as the driving force of the solution to "who blew out Brian's brain" and stole his earlier AI technology. Not too surprisingly, the development of Sven leads him to become a significant adjunct in solving that specific problem.
By the comparison with Man Plus, where we see a grievous dehumanization of the Cyborg as his organs, then even elements of his chemical being are replaced, The Turing Option is less black and ridden with agony; the tone is essentially rational and optimistic. The reason for that optimism may seem a little unusual. There is not only one protagonist, Brian; there is eventually a second protagonist, Sven, the robot AI. Part of the interest, the central interest in the book, perhaps even its ultimate justification, is noticing that these two creatures have each their own developmental trajectories. Those developmental trajectories cross, and in doing so help us bridge the gap between visions of human intelligence and machine intelligence.
Such is the primary vision of The Turing Option, what gives the book its novelty and depth. This is the reason that the book will remain of interest for a very long time.
Acknowledgments:
With thanks and gratitude to the fall 1992 Purdue students of my class on Artificial Intelligence and Education, for their eager and perceptive discussions of The Society of Mind and The Turing Option.
Publication notes: