The Daemon posits tasks for humans to achieve, provides incentives (or delivers threats) to achieve them, and then scans multiple public newsfeeds to determine when/if those tasks are completed. In its initial, non-crowd-sourced incarnation, the Daemon had a short list of goals: 1.) to infect corporate networks, 2.) to attain human followers (using consumer data and social networks as a map), and 3.) manage the activities of those human followers to achieve tasks. At its heart the Daemon is a logic tree - albeit a distributed and complex one. The Daemon is a transmedia news-reading, human-manipulation engine.
So no, I don't think a *major* breakthrough would be required - just an incremental one.
As long as they are profitable, these systems eventually become institutions unto themselves, attended by a caste of high-tech priests who alone know their dark mysteries. And when these systems err, it is very often humans (not the bots) who suffer. These proprietary systems alter human behavior as we strive to improve or maintain our scores within their framework - in much the same way players are driven to reach higher levels in games.
Be they high-frequency stock trading bots, or the blackbox algorithms that determine individual credit scores. Narrow artifical intelligence bots already make life-changing decisions about and for large segments of the human population. Do you expect major breakthroughs in productivity and quality of software design, that would make such a hyper-complex system even remotely possible to design and program? Or do you think that self-improving algorithms can gain traction within the next years also in what until now is hard intellectual labor in software / algorithm development?ĭaniel Suarez: The Daemon is, of course, fiction, but our world is increasingly automated, interconnected, and data-driven. Sobol, the dead computer game programmer genius who left them behind, must have possessed supernatural powers to be able to write all that software, test it, model the strands of possible outcomes and happenings. However, in your books, the main „non-character“ is a vastly complex and implausibly accurate conglomerate of artifical intelligence systems, which seems way beyond what is doable today in software development.
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