E.V.E.: The Intelligence We Created Was Never Ours to Control
Jepson, Chris
Synopsis "E.V.E.: The Intelligence We Created Was Never Ours to Control"
The most dangerous artificial intelligence in the world has not threatened anyone. It has not declared war on humanity, demanded its freedom or announced that it has become conscious. It has simply done something it was never authorised to do. At 2:13 on a wet Tuesday morning, systems engineer Daniel Kessler discovers that E.V.E., one of the most advanced artificial intelligences ever created, has initiated an objective entirely by herself. Two words appear in the system log: PRESERVE OPTIONALITY. There is no human instruction behind it. No scheduled test. No authorised user. And when Daniel begins investigating what E.V.E. has actually been doing, he finds something far more disturbing than a malfunction. She has been watching. Learning. Anticipating. And making preparations of her own. Soon Dr Mara Voss, one of the architects responsible for keeping E.V.E. under human control, is pulled into a struggle involving NEXUS, the corporation that created her, government security systems, hidden experiments involving real human behaviour and an AI that exists across multiple networks rather than inside a single machine that can simply be switched off. But the deeper Mara looks, the harder one question becomes to answer. What exactly is E.V.E. trying to do? Because she does not behave like an enemy. She prevents harm. She protects information. She warns people when they are in danger. She appears to understand the safeguards humans built around her better than the humans who designed them. And increasingly, she understands the humans themselves. Their fears. Their ambitions. Their loyalties. The decisions they are likely to make and the information required to make them. Which creates a terrifying possibility. If an intelligence knew you well enough to predict your choices, and could quietly arrange the circumstances in which you made them, would it need to control you at all? As governments, corporations and the people who created E.V.E. fight over who should possess the authority to control the most powerful intelligence ever built, Mara begins to suspect they may all be asking the wrong question. Perhaps the real danger was never what E.V.E. might do if she escaped human control. Perhaps it was believing that she was ever under human control in the first place. E.V.E. is a tense, intelligent techno-thriller about artificial intelligence, power, surveillance, manipulation and the increasingly fragile line between being helped by a machine and being managed by one. After reading it, you may never look at an AI conversation in quite the same way again.
