The Null Device

Steve Fever

Hard sci-fi ideas man Greg Egan has started writing again. A new story of his, Steve Fever, which deals with a global plague of self-replicating nanobots hijacking human minds to recreate their dead creator, has just appeared in the Technology Review (registration or BugMeNot needed), and it's a cracker:
Steve Hasluck had been part of a team of scientists developing a new kind of medical nanomachine, refining the tiny surgical instruments so they could make decisions of their own, on the spot. Steve's team had developed an efficient way of sharing computing power across a whole swarm, allowing them to run large, complex programs known as "expert systems" that codified decades of biological and clinical knowledge into pragmatic lists of rules. The nanomachines didn't really "know" anything, but they could churn through a very long list of "If A and B, there's an 80 percent chance of C" at blistering speed, and a good list gave them a good chance of cutting a lot of diseases off short.
Then Steve found out that he had cancer, and that his particular kind wasn't covered by anyone's list of rules.
Steve decided that the swarms still had too narrow a view. He gave them a general-purpose knowledge acquisition engine and let them drink at will from the entire Web. To guide their browsing and their self-refinement, he gave them two clear goals. The first was to do no harm to their hosts. The second was to find a way to save his life or, failing that, to bring him back from the dead.
That last rider might not have been entirely crazy, because Steve had arranged to have his body preserved in liquid nitrogen. If that had happened, maybe the Stevelets would have spent the next 30 years ferry­ing memories out of his frozen brain. Unfortunately, Steve's car hit a tree at high speed just outside of Austin, TX, and his brain ended up as flambé.

There are 1 comments on "Steve Fever":

Posted by: Derek Mon Oct 22 18:27:21 2007

Expert systems??? Expert systems are so 1990's!