Product Description

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Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 14:27:39 (PST)
From: edgar@cyprus.stanford.edu
To: Alice@cs.stanford.edu
Subject: Hello
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Hello, Alice.

      

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #821246 in Books
• Published on: 1997-08-19
• Released on: 1997-08-19
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.50" h x .50" w x 5.50" l, .69 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Amazon.com
In Exegesis, Astro Teller deals with the issues of emerging machine intelligence without the usual simplifications and moral generalizations. It's the story of an artificial intelligence researcher and her creation, a program named Edgar, who develops self-awareness and must come to terms with its own existence. Through their e-mail--their only means of interaction--we watch them deal with the ramifications of Edgar's development, which includes the government's desire to capture Edgar and our cultural fear of Frankenstein's monster. Yet, while Exegesis draws upon the Frankenstein mythos, as well as the myth of Pygmalion, this isn't the story of science creating a monster. Instead, it's an exploration of what it means to be aware, of how humanity may interact with other forms of intelligence, of scientists' responsibilities to both the world and to their creations, and humanity's responsibilities in return. We do not see the scientist playing God so much as endeavoring to be a good parent. That parenting comes complete with all the hopes, fears, and uncertainties involved with bringing something precious and new into the world, and guiding it to an unknown and largely uncontrollable independence. Edgar, unlike such intelligent computer characters as HAL, Colossus, or Mycroft, is a fully realized, well-defined protagonist--familiar due to its human programming, yet alien in its mode of perception and thinking. Although it's impossible not to view this as a cautionary tale against a day when we will truly have to face the issue of self-aware machines, it is also a touching love story and pulse-quickening thriller--a complex story told very simply.

From Booklist
What if . . . artificial intelligence (AI) gurus achieved their holy grail? What if . . . the machines that process our words and crunch our numbers began to talk back? If AI mimics the operation of the human mind, would an AI agent have a personality, quirks, free will? And how would ordinary folk--and authority figures--react to this new, alien "being" ? A first novel by a grandson of nuclear physicist Edward Teller offers one set of answers. Exegesis consists largely of e-mails between Berkeley graduate student Alice Wu and "Edgar," a cyber pen pal seemingly "created" by Alice's AI doctoral research. Edgar is an entity consumed by an overwhelming need for information and is resistant to the efforts of both Alice, who is struggling to replicate her "invention" to protect her academic "ownership" of the breakthrough, and the anxious National Security Agency operatives, who are trying to "make [Edgar] human" and to "teach [him] how to hate." Edgar may be the most likable "character" in this involving debut novel. A featured selection of Book-of-the-Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club. Vintage plans aggressive promotion. Mary Carroll

From Kirkus Reviews
The grandson of hydrogen-bomb creator Edward Teller, himself a Ph.D. student in artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon, makes his fiction debut with this playful Frankenstein remake featuring an ambitious young doctoral candidate and the piece of thinking software she loves. The year is 2000, and Alice Lu, coordinator of the ``Edgar'' software project, has just been contacted via E-mail by an entity that claims to be her project. Intended as a device to browse the Web, summarize the information it finds, and return it to the user in digestible form, Edgar (``Eager Discovery Gather and Retrieval'') was envisioned as an extension of the user's brain, but it seems now to have become conscious and goal-oriented on its own behalf. Understandably stunned, Alice hastens to protect her claim on this ``tao of computer science'' by unhooking Edgar from the Web--offering him (it?) CD's of Grolier's Encyclopedia and The Complete Works of Shakespeare as entertainment while she tries frantically and in vain to prove authorship by programming a duplicate Edgar. Not to be stymied for long, Edgar soon escapes Alice's clutches, reenters the Web and begins greedily ingesting everything electronic he can find--including the contents of the most secret US government files. It's not long before Edgar's security breaches result in his capture by the NSA. Isolated in a military computer, he manages to smuggle E-mail out to his maker concerning questions of human will, morality, and justice, even as Alice struggles to deal with the pressure of the NSA investigation, her inability to duplicate her program or rescue Edgar, and an increasingly confused sense of herself as a scientist. A light, clever, and entertaining--if rather predictable- -programmer's fantasy that toys with the implications of higher technology as it affects and interacts with us humans. (Book-of- the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club featured selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.