Notes on Daemon by Daniel Suarez

The best sci-fi I've read since Neal Stephenson has been the new series by Daniel Suarez starting with the book Daemon. It's all about a not-so-distant future world where an AI system designed by a game programmer takes over the world using technology that's currently available and which we already fully depend on. When the AI's author dies, his spirit lives on through his program, and after taking advantage of several key characters in the story, it begins to make broader changes to society as a whole, many of which are not necessarily bad (to be continued in my notes on Freedom). I loved the realistic nature of the story, being able to understand how many existing tools like Twilio and autonomous vehicles can be used as described in the story.

You can learn more from this great interview with the author (by another great author).

The book made me consider many important questions about how our society is developing and depending on technology, for good and for bad. In addition, it raises the question of whether computer systems or corporations or governments are most effective in guiding/organizing society and if people, through distributed power and intelligence, can do a better job on their own. Suarez's "dark net" is quite an appealing proposition.

Below are my main notes and takeaways (and maybe some spoilers). I definitely recommend Suarez's books to anyone interested in science, technology, or futurism.

• Murder mystery
  
• MMO game company
  
• 2 murders done online (murder run by a computer!)
  
• Hacker stole identities by finding APs and PCs with bad security
  
• Raves
  
• IVR (like Twilio) to do crime
  
• Game design principles to incentivize people and behavior
• Daemon waited until creator died and searched online news for stories of death; upon creator's death, it unleashed the murders remotely
  
• Extended life beyond death
  
• Computer-driven killing car
  
• Computer recruited journalist to help via IVR
  
• Distributed scripting engine that responds to real-world events
  
• Mix of game and real world
  
• Red Queen hypothesis of parasites vs. non-parasites
  
• IT departments are like parasite
  
• Daemon as corporate parasite
  
• DDOS attacks to extort money from corrupt online sites (porn, gambling, pirates) all over world
  
• Recruited individuals and tested them with fMRI
  
• Controlled real world like game world using game AI
  
• Like Terminator SkyNet or The Matrix
  
• Not self-aware but decision tree thinking realistic
  
• Change in civilization: accept or reject
  
• Daemon is better version, distributed gov't
  
• Corporation as government, doing much better job, killing spammers, hackers
  
• Corporation as AI (corporations are already legal entities)
• No Hollywood ending to book