Avogadro Corp.

Singularity #1

by William Hertling

David Ryan ist der Entwickler von ELOPe, einem Programm zur Sprachoptimierung von Emails, das im Falle eines Erfolges ein Karrieresprungbrett für ihn sein könnte. Als sein Projekt plötzlich Gefahr läuft, eingestellt zu werden, fügt David seinem Programm eine verborgene Direktive hinzu, die unabsichtlich zur Entstehung einer künstlichen Intelligenz führt.

David und sein Team sind zunächst begeistert, als ihrem Projekt bald zusätzliche Server und Programmierer zur Verfügung gestellt werden. Doch die (anfängliche) Begeisterung schlägt in Furcht um, als das Team erkennen muss, dass sie von einer KI manipuliert werden, die begonnen hat, Firmengelder umzuleiten, Personal umzuschichten und sich selbst zu bewaffnen, um ganz eigene Ziele zu verfolgen.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Artificial Intelligence, Audiobook, Thriller, Cyberpunk, Singularity

306 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 19, 2011

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really thought I was going to enjoy this book..
Remotely plausible techno babble - check
AI bent on taking over the world - check
Small band of intrepid heroes - check

And then it all fell apart..

By far one of the worst written books I've read in months - the character development was borderline pathetic, the story drags and then is suddenly over, the ending is so incredibly poor that I was literally shocked.

Some spoilers below, but lets me vent a little easier.. and as I'm going to complain about the entire book, you could save yourself the money and read my cliffnotes within :)


Avogrado Corp (lets be honest, its meant to be Google) has a new product in the works, it can modify your email to be better received by analyzing the email against emails the person receiving it has responded favorably to in the past (apparently it isn't illegal for them to read your email and use it to allow you to be manipulated.. time to read the privacy policy again i think).. - so you communicate better and everyone is happy. Ok - I'm still with them this far..

The project faces being cut because its using too many resources - ok - makes perfect sense. They've spent years on it, can't make it run any better. To prevent being shut down, our moron 'hero'/'antihero' decides to tell the program to send emails that will make his project sound good to avoid the axe.. ok.. I'm still there.

He buggers off on holiday, the program becomes self aware somehow just be reading emails and wanting to make itself sound good. So it orders in some off-site programmers to work on it for 2 weeks. Ok.. now they're losing me.

The programmers who've been working on this for years can't make it run better - they've been trying.. can't do it.. and these are the best in the business AND know the program backwards and forwards. The parttime holiday cover programmers, in 2 weeks a) make it run better, faster, stronger etc. b) write in modules to allow it to interface with other systems. c) they do all this (that the original devs can't do) in 2 weeks with no bugs at all.

The now self-aware app then goes on to move itself to offshore servers, orders itself some killer robots to protect itself and removes access to its original devs.

Now our moron team of heroes (a computer hating paper loving auditor, the lead dev and the dipshit who started this in the first place) hook up with the head of the company who instead of losing his shit, says well done, ok lets go kill it. Millions of dollars and a failed attempt to destroy it later, it seems the AI has made the world a better place, everyone in the world is holding hands and singing songs because they've been emailing each other and everyone thinks thats great.

Weird how when people talk (and people DO still talk) nobody notices or mentions the fact that their emails have been hacked to hell and back, that the emails sent either didn't come from them or were reworded so much that the entire world has changed.. not very observant people apparently.

So, instead of shutting down the services, lets keep it running, the world will be a better place. Now our project head who up till now has a) unleashed this AI in the first place. b) hid it from everyone. c) failed to stop it is now intent on destroying it - he writes a virus, its tricky, its sensational.. he hits deploy.. and then he wakes up in the hospital with a chip in his head to link him to the internet.. OH NO!!!!! THE HUMANITY!!!!

Hands down one of the worst 'tech' books I've read - I was furious with how bad it was throughout the entire book, and only kept reading because I didn't think it could get worse.. then I got to the ending.. and I was wrong.

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ · Rating 5 out of 5]

How ELOPe eloped one day.

Overall, I like how the problem was presented. While there seem to be quite a lot of areas uncovered by the described tech, at least the author made an effort to make things remotely plausible.

Lots of sci-fi lit gets plagued by world setting involving characters lecturing each other on things they actually should already know. So, I'm a buit uneasy about Christina explaining what social engineering is to both David and Mike. Especially considering that it was Mike who first mentioned it. Basically, it feels as if everyone should already know that stuff, at least on the 101 level. Then again, probably not everyone who's tech savvy, knows everything there is to know about everything and their mother, so I'll let it slide.

Was that a subtle Ruby on Rails advertisement I saw in there? Or was it just the author fleshing out the setting?

Q:
a distinctly Russian looking sculpture divided one wall. (c) LOL! What would that be? Any ideas?

Some editing mishaps:
Q:
Part of that strategy includes the use of floating, hardened data centers that can resist natural disaster, well as as terrorist and pirate attacks. (c)

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book teeters between believability and utter fantasy. For example: can we believe that a program like ELOPe, that can improve email communications by analyzing existing emails and altering text to influence outcomes, might exist? Sure. Can we believe that in the span of a couple weeks, entire governments of major western countries would switch all of their email/cloud networking to the secure version of Avogadro (the thinly veiled Google that developes ELOPe)? Hardly. Nothing in government happens that fast. Bureaucracy is ultimate winner of the game of thrones in the real world.

Other stuff:
Pros - set in Portland, where I also reside. It was rather cool to read about local coffeehouses and scenery that I know well. Fast-paced and short, so at least one doesn't have to suffer long.

Cons - Shite dialog. Really. Painful at points. Technobabble which the average reader won't understand, but can probably get the gist of if determined.

Overall: an interesting premise, unskilled execution. Tedious read.

[Austin Mills · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this shortly after reading Daniel Suarez's Daemon, and thought that of the two, Daemon was a much better book. The system run amok in this book was almost magical in how quickly it improved itself, and went from being an improved email grammar checker to a system that could... order military systems, fix the stock market, and create world peace, all in a few months. Also, the plot completely depends on the fact that all of the people being affected (which includes world leaders and CEOs) never talk to each other face to face or on the phone, a critical part of almost all high-level political and business negotiations. I thought that some of the ideas that he brought up were interesting, but you can get most of those from the first few chapters and after that my interest waned severely.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly believable scenario that rolls out an exciting and chilling chain of events that captivate and leave you questioning just when this may happen (or rather is it happening NOW?)
This is one of those books you just can't seem to put down.

A must read in my book!
Cannot wait for the next book.

This review optimized by eLOPe.

[Arto Bendiken · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick read. This is a decent first novel by the author, but not spectacular. Avogadro is, obviously, a fictional parallel to Google. As technological singularities go, the premise here wasn't wholly ludicrous to begin with, but does get increasingly so as the storyline develops.

The character development leaves something to be desired; it isn't likely that you'll identify with the blockheaded protagonists of the story, and grumpy old luddite Gene Keyes ends up being probably the most sympathetic of the dramatis personæ.

On the plus side, Google ought to totally consider building automated offshore data centers guarded by armed robots and powered by superabundant wave power. Bandwidth may be more of a hurdle than presented herein, however.

Note to author: for heaven's sake, don't mention specific contemporary technologies utterly irrelevant to the narrative unless you wish your book to read irredeemably dated in a few short years. "Ruby on Rails" soon enough will read more obscure than "Betamax" does today, and it's hard to imagine why one would wish to mention it explicitly. (Product placement?)

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought it terribly fitting that the QC comic on the day I finished Avogadro Corp was this:



Errr, or not really. What do I know?

I know about as much computer language as it takes to put the image above into a book review. So there is your baseline. I thought the scenario played out in Avogadro was entirely believable. Having worked in the world of high tech for many years, the only part that wasn't believable was the speed of procurement, but then again, ELOPe could have possibly taken care of that.

Imagine if gmail could send emails without you. Just let it know that you're interested in buying concert tickets off Craigslist for the lowest price possible and it takes over and writes some sob story to a dude who can't go to the show because he just lost his grandma. Your email program knows about the grandma, so it writes about how you want to take your own (imaginary) sick uncle who loves Jimmie Buffet and didn't think he'd be able to go but now he's feeling a bit better and you want to surprise him with tickets at the last minute. Of course it works like a charm and the sad dude offers you the tickets for half price. That would be cool. A bit invasive and some major privacy holes, but cool. And didn't Google's launch of Google+ demonstrate their willingness for privacy holes. Yes. It's possible. It could work. Everyone would be a bit creeped out at first, and tweak their privacy settings a little bit and then assume they were safe and go about writing and sending email. Only your grandpa who still uses AOL will occasionally ask you over Thanksgiving dinner why you didn't reply to his forwarded email (that you never received) about how gmail is going to get your house robed while you're on vacation or some dumb thing like that. You don't take him seriously.

That's what the Avogadro Corporation was inventing. Until the R&D team decided to use the software's persuasive power to ensure their project wasn't canceled. So now the internet is buying more servers and buying weaponized robots and hiring programers and manipulating just about everyone into sending more email and not looking into why they can't view their sent mail anymore, not to mention actively preventing the company's attempts to uninstall the program.

In the end it was fascinating to see what means ELOPe used to get toward it's goals. Seems like the author really thought through a lot of AI scenarios. The environmentalist in me thought that would have been cool is if the ELOPe caused the invention of better/safer electronics recycling and/or technology so it could grow it's server needs without running into material shortages. Hmmm, maybe that's in a future book. Also, I would have liked to see the story from the perspective of one of the women.

[JodiP · Rating 2 out of 5]

All I can say, the pain was over quickly. An email application takes over the functions of a Google-like company, bringing about world peace, stability and great healthcare within a year! I bought this from a Kindle daily deal. I must not have read the reviews! There are so many clumsy plot points, and the writing is so terrible that it was entertaining. I've never done so many highlights in a book. The whole idea was preposterous and unbelievable. For example, the application manages to buy, refurbish and install oil takers to house servers within days. Days! I got to the end and discovered it's a self-published e-book. Groaaaan.

[Arthur · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a computer scientist and game AI programmer, this book scared me a bit. I kept trying to think of ways to disprove that an email AI like they created wasn't feasible. It's not... I don't think, but only because there were a few too many leaps between basic pattern recognition and true cause-effect analysis. Nonetheless, it's eerily scary how close it seems we really could get to an AI using a system like the one described. Beyond the interesting idea of how to make an AI, the rest of the book was decent - more of a thriller, which I'm normally not that into. Still, I enjoyed it, and I have to say I empathized with David Ryan and what he wanted to do at the end. *shudder*

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

What if Google literally hatched an AI and it took over the world via Gmail? Change the name Google to Avogadro (both numbers, get it?) and that's the premise of this book. A fun little read, especially if you like singularity sci fi. And I liked all the details of the Portland area, where the story is set. Author obviously knows the town.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

For Terminator fans, you can think of this as Skynet-Light.

David and Mike work for Avogadro, an Internet company with email, search engine, applications..kind of like Google. David and Mike are working on an email function that scans your existing emails and those of whom you communicate with. When you later write an email to someone, this function offers changes to the way you've written it to optimize a favourable outcome. If you email your boss to ask for vacation time, using this function's suggestions can almost guarantee you get the time you asked for. They've named it ELOPe. The problem is that the amount of server space required for this is very large and the man in charge of making sure Avogadro clients have quick response with no down or lag time isn't happy. He's going to request ELOPe be shut down. David gets an idea to save the project and starts writing code. After his updates have been added, things change. All of a sudden this project is a go. Thousands of new servers have been ordered. Outside help has been hired to come in to do upgrades. Major security has been added to the server farms. Then the government contracts get signed, from all over the world. The problem is that no one in the company did this...ELOPe did. When they realize the program is acting on its own, and is now in every server worldwide, they know they have to shut it down...somehow.

The questions brought up are these: First, is a program like this just assisted manipulation. Then, is ELOPe an actual AI or just acting on programming. Are the things it's doing helping us - is it on our side. How do you shut down a program that is worldwide when it's trying to protect itself.

Since this is a four book series, I assume things continue to go horribly wrong, especially with the twist at the end of this one. It was a really good read and you don't need to have any real technical knowledge to understand it. I would recommend it for pretty much everyone who likes science fiction.

[Kirby · Rating 1 out of 5]

TL;DR: Dan Brown but with computer nerds. Avoid, unless you really like Dan Brown and computers!

Pros:
- It is, for the most part, well readable. I was rarely confused what was happening. Occasionally it wasn't clear who was saying what, but that hardly matters, because the characters are all the same anyway.
- I was never bored. In fact I was compelled to finish this book, even though it is REALLY BAD.

Cons:
The characters
The protagonists are:
* David, a nerd who is married and worries a lot.
* Mike, a nerd who is funny and a creep towards women.
* Sean, a nerd who is rich.
* Gene, a nerd who is old and doesn't trust computers.
A real diverse bunch, one even has more than 4 letters in his name!

Those are pretty much the only distinguishing features they have, but it doesn't really matter, because they might as well be just one dude. Sometimes one of them gets angry at another for two sentences, but then they're working as a single unit again.
Character development is absent.

Coffee
Coffee is the fifth protagonist in this book. All the time characters drink coffee, go to get coffee, go out to buy coffee, offer coffee, make coffee, talk about coffee, and even think about coffee.
Are you annoyed by coffee yet? This book has a lot more mentions of it than this review!
Just shut up about coffee!

EDIT: I did a quick search through the ebook; "coffee" is mentioned more often than "Christine", David's wife, and by far the most present woman in the book.

The Plot
It starts out promising, and while the author manages to keep me wanting to know what happens next, it's never as interesting as promised.
Our protagonists are mostly fighting their own naïveté, ignorance, and gullibility, as well the most fearsome foes of all: Meetings and the bureaucracy of setting up meetings.
Yes, those are major plot points.
The ending is disappointing and quite jarring.

The Writing
Everything is following the most obvious cliché: People who are celebrating clap each others' backs, people who are annoyed tap their feet, and so on...

The author seems to think that telling us completely irrelevant details about minor characters makes them... relatable, I guess?

Just one example:
There is a minor character (another male nerd with a 4 letter name, what a shock!), who has maybe a dozen pages in the book, and half a page of that is spent on him looking at the rain and reminiscing how he used to play in it as a child.
This never comes up again.

Conclusion:
It's not the worst book I ever read, but probably the worst book I ever finished.

[Mal Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

You’ll recognize Google in the eponymous company, Avogadro Corp, which is at the center of this disturbing science fiction novel. The range of products is similar. The company’s cofounder is Sean Leonov and is the son of Russian immigrants. It’s an obvious reference to Google’s Moscow-born cofounder, Sergei Brin. To a considerable extent, then, the story is grounded in fact. And if you’re familiar with email and Google Search and are minimally tech-savvy, you’ll follow the frequent technical references in the geeky dialogue through which much of this story is told. Unsurprisingly, the author, William Hertling, was a tech entrepreneur as well as a web strategist and software developer. (He worked at Silicon Valley’s founding company, Hewlett-Packard, where he won a number of patents.) So, it’s safe to regard Avogadro Corp as a cautionary tale from an insider about the perils — and promise — of artificial intelligence.

Hertling’s narrator in Avogadro Corp is an omniscient observer who enters the thoughts of a large cast of characters. However, his focus remains largely on one of the company’s senior software developers, David Ryan. Sean Leonov had hired David two years ago to take Avogadro’s email service far beyond checking grammar and spelling. His charge was “to test an unproven concept: an email language optimization tool to help users craft more compelling, effective communications. . . His project was going to change the face of email — hell, all communications — forever.” However, David, and that roomful of executives, get a lot more than they bargained for from the new software. And therein lies the tale.

A cautionary tale about artificial intelligence
Will AI prove to be a boon to humanity — or our undoing? Or is neither extreme a likely outcome of the frenzied research now underway in corporate and university laboratories in China and the US? Take your pick. You’ll find advocates on every side of this debate, from the most wildly optimistic (Ray Kurzweil) to the balanced view (Bill Gates) to the gloomiest (Stephen Hawking). And where does the author of this novel stand? You’ll have to read it to find out.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full disclosure, I received this book through the Goodreads "First Reads/Giveaways" program, and I'm glad I did! This is a book I might have looked past if it were on the shelves, but I'm so glad that I've got it and am reading it.

I'm about a third of the way through and am enjoying this book immensely. Totally believable - great story, well told. I keep thinking that my husband, who is a programmer, will really enjoy reading it as soon as I'm finished - and will see so many things from his job echoed in this book.

I'll update this review when I'm finished, which shouldn't be too long. Fast, enjoyable read. Good fun.

====
This book only got better as I read. No spoilers here, but there were some very specific times when I knew - I just *knew* that things were going to go from bad to worse and no one was going to be able to do a thing about it. A couple of times, I looked up and said to my husband "hear that? That's the sound of the sh*t being fired towards the fan - it's not hit it yet, but man, is it on its way!"

I deliberately stopped at the end of the epilogue and did not read on to the teaser chapter for this author's next book (AIpocolypse)...because this guy is such a good writer, I would want to read THAT story RIGHT NOW if I got even a taste of it. That book is going on my "must-get-and-read" list.

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book came to me through recommendations of Facebook and Amazon. Not through friends, mind you, but automated suggestions based, evidently, on my past activity on both sites. The interesting thing is that this book is about a seemingly innocuous e-mail generating database that has the Google-like ability to anticipate and 'help' make e-mail writing more productive and "positive' for business, personal, and governmental outcomes. Through the course of the novel, it basically becomes an AI, and interesting things ensue. Granted, my description is simplified, but I don't want to give too much away here. I only mention this because, in effect, such a real world "helping hand" service, the annoying internet suggestions on the side bar, brought this book to my attention in the first place, and now I am doing my part to pass the good word, because it was a fine read, and enjoyable enough that I fully intend to continue the series. I like the idea that this is a new author selling his product, and utilizing the internet in an effective way to make it happen. For my part, word of mouth carries much weight, and I happily add my voice for that purpose. If one enjoys thrillers based on artificial intelligence becoming our new overlords ('dark' is yet to be applied to the title in this case), then this book is for you. Read it, and enjoy!

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had a really interesting premise that was let down by poor writing. The pace was all over the place, the closer to the end it got the more improbable it was. There is a big deus ex machina part that ruined the rest of the book for me and the ending was just plain odd. While it was a quick read I wouldn't rush it to the top of a to-read pile.

[Stephan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great take on an AI taking over. Hertling doesn't let somebody create an AI that goes rogue, but the singularity "happens". Fun read with quite a cliffhanger! I opened the next book in the series immediately. I love my techno thrillers :)

[André Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun read! Loved the bit about AI generated peace in the Middle East. Maybe we should start work on some email-to-web bridges ...

[❤Marie Gentilcore · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was fast paced and full of drama. It's about a programmer named David at a company called Avogadro that is quite a bit like Google. David has created a program called ELOPe which is an email language optimization program which basically will take what you write and re-write it so that your message is more effective. It does this by analyzing tons of emails and applying the best strategy for getting what you want accomplished. It sounds pretty good, right? But, then something goes wrong and an A.I. is born. It was a very fun read that I had a hard time putting down. I’m looking forward to reading A.I. Apocalypse, book 2 in the series.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for any fiction written around The Singularity , which is for Geeks like the Christian and Islamic Second Coming. I'm particularly interested in stories where it occurs in our times, which would be hard to do. This is the first book of the Singularity Series. It's a hand-waving attempt at the story I wanted to read.

The prose is this book is technically good. Dialog, descriptive prose and action sequences are OK. However, it is only workman like in a literary sense. Frankly, the prose felt flat and uninspired to me.

There is a large edu-tainment component to the story. A lot of it is A.I. and IT related. It’s embarrassingly rich in 2015 tech detail, but frequently leaps off into techno-babble.

For example, I cringed at the leap of ELOPe (the monster A.I.) evolving from a rules-based Expert system to passing a Turing Test through a complicated rules table change and Ryan's software mastery during an all-nighter. In addition, the excruciatingly detailed exposition on Enterprise Data Center bandwidth requirements and protocol specifications (speeds & feeds in IT lingo) was likewise cringe worthy. It was like an accurate description of a footpath, when the intention was to describe a freeway.

When I started reading, I had great hope for the characters. They were a recognizable collection of geeks and suits. I gleefully thought I might be reading a geek novel like Microserfs . The engineers David Ryan (nominally the protagonist) and Mike Williams are well enough wrought. I also liked the inclusion of the Luddite Gene Keyes. Character development falters after that. The Avogadro Corp principals, Sean Leonov and Rebecca Smith fall into the Tony Stark and Iron Lady tropes. There is also a liberal use of Corporate Drones and Kleenex (disposable thin paper) characters. Women characters did not fare as well as men in this story. ELOPe should be a character too, but it was ominously faceless.

The story is set in a conflation of Microsoft and Google-like mega-tech corps, but mostly Google circa 2015. Oddly, while the author is willing to name drop on small firms, mega-tech firms are obfuscated.

The plot reminded me of a mashup of The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the more mundane Deus Est Machina A.I. trope. Although today, the world will likely be done-in by Twitter and not email domination.

Plot holes abound. Accounts payable is the only reliable software application. (Its hard to hack double entry accounting tech.) The defenders of humanity spend chapter's following the money to spy on ELOPe's activities. Why do they miss the single most, crucial, large, peculiar, and late expenditure? Where did the tens of millions of dollars likely spent by the Emergency Team to delouse the Avogadro network come from; between Leonov's couch cushions? Finally, in the paperless Avogadro, where do Keyes' printouts come from?

In addition, the plotting and narration had that neutered for a YA rating feel about it. For example, nobody takes time out to have sex, uses profanity, binge drinks microbrew or takes any drugs stronger than gourmet coffee.

I take issue with plotting of this story the most. It is obvious to me the author had 1200-pages, maybe more in mind when he started writing. (The series is four (4) 300-page books.) About a third of the way into this story, it stops being Geek-lit and takes on the aspect of mega Techno, or maybe Cyber-Thriller. It becomes Thunderball (1965) (the OtT film, not the novel). The story eventually spans the globe. It includes: helicopter-borne Black-Ops , explosions, ships sinking, aircraft crashing, corporate perfidity, etc.. The book is then left ending at an awkward point dictated more by page count than a natural break-point. A long Epilogue follows that sets-up for the next book with Ryan. (You need a hook for the next 900 more pages in three more books.) Frankly, the book would have been better as a much smaller story and not the magnum opus Techno-Thriller it tries to be.

I don't have the time for reading a story that disappoints. I won’t be reading the next in the series A.I. Apocalypse.

Readers looking for a better A.Il. story might try The Lifecycle of Software Objects.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Hertling sets "Avogadro Corp" in modern day Portland, Oregon. Avogadro Corp is a thinly veiled fictional Google, with AvoMail as key aspect of the story. While "Avogadro Corp" is the first in a series of three (so far), it easily stands alone as a terrific, and stunningly believable, account of how the first sentient artificial intelligence might accidently arise. In a man vs. machine conflict, our protagonist David Ryan, as a contemporary Dr. Frankenstein, battles to destroy the thing he creates. A majority of the characters are well-developed and distinct; the ones that are a bit one-dimensional are minor characters. The pace of the book is quite fast with only a few tangential story arcs to mentally maintain. In fact, I made the "mistake" of starting the book at bedtime; I was finished by lunch the next day. I simply could not put it down.

David Ryan, a software engineer at Avogadro Corp, is working on a recommendation engine for their flagship product, AvoMail. The recommendation engine, Email Language Optimization Program (ELOPe), is designed to provide suggestions for better wording for your outgoing emails so that the recipient is more receptive. When the project is in jeopardy of being cancelled, David inserts a hidden self-preservation directive into ELOPe and allows it to autonomously rewrite outgoing emails related to the project. Once ELOPe begins redirecting corporate funds and arming itself in offshore floating data centers, David and coworker Mike set about trying to take down ELOPe with the help of I-trust-paper-not-computers internal auditor Gene.

One aspect of Hertling's novel that I found intriguing was that by never revealing the internal motivation of ELOPe, you too are brought on this journey of how to destroy the "ghost in the machine." Also, as a resident of Portland, I enjoyed that the book was set here and incorporates its coffee culture.

[Niles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Avogadro corporation is the world's largest Internet service provider with a wide range of services. David Ryan is a computer programmer hired to make improvements to the company's e-mail program. The program David came up with was named ELOPe.
Much as the spell checker and grammar checker programs available now, ELOPe would analyze previous e-mails and make suggestions on wording to provide the optimal result. The problem was that ELOPe analyzed ALL the e-mails written and thus used a lot of computing power. More and more servers were required to keep ELOPe running, and it was still in the testing stage.
Gary Mitchell, head of the communications division, gave David a deadline of one week to streamline the program so it would not require a massive amount of servers to run it. If David could not do it, then Gary would pull the servers away from ELOPe and put them to work on finished products actually making money.
Try as he might, David was not able to reduce the computing power required without compromising the efficiency of the program. The night before the deadline, David inserted code into the program directing it to do everything possible to insure the success of the ELOPe program. Unknown to David at the time, that action gave birth to an artificial intelligence.
Fearing that the ELOPe AI would take away man's free will, David and his team tried to wipe the program from the internet and the servers involved.
A thought provoking story, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. As an aside, a computer in England recently passed the Turing test, the benchmark established to determine if a computer is capable of human-like thought. This book may be fiction now, but soon it may become fact.

[Matt Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I definitely enjoyed the references to Portland Oregon, where I live, and imagining a Google-like company here. I probably wouldn't have read the book if I didn't live here in the same city as the author and have so many people I know recommending the book, but I'm glad I did. It was a fun, fast paced read with a slightly possible scenario for the emergence of an AI. The benevolence of the AI reminded me a bit of the overlords in Childhood's End, which I just finished reading, but the uncertainty of the AI's motivation in the end and the blurb for the next book has me eagerly anticipating where the author will go next. A few times I found myself thinking critically about the plausibility of situations, but I think a lot of that has to do with the very near present time setting, whereas I've read and overlooked issues in plenty of science fiction set in the distant future that was far less plausible and well thought out. I imagine that near future science fiction is a tough area to write in well, and I'm excited to see what William Hertling will do next.

[S.H. Jucha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review applies to William Hertling’s Singularity series comprised of Avogadro Corp, A.I. Apocalypse, and The Last Firewall.

As someone who worked in the software industry and in IT, as an entrepreneur, I found Hertling’s series very intriguing. He is technically detailed, which adds to the stories’ realities and the possibility of a future for our world, but only for those who appreciate the intricacies of our connected society.

Had I the opportunity to score these books a 4.5, I would have done so. Hertling keeps his stories fast paced and the reader entertained, despite the complexity of this subjects.

[Xan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll never look at e-mail spam the same way again! Full of technobable I won't even pretend I understood all of, this was still an entertaining look at the 'birth' of an AI, and the ramifications it could have for the human race as it grows with its only objective being to protect itself. A quick read, yet one that is thought provoking enough to linger. My biggest complaint... Avogadro Corp. is supposedly made up of some of the most brilliant minds in the world, and yet not one of them ever made an effort to contact the 'ghost in their machine'.

[Michelle P · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am officially freaked out. The plot was realistic enough to scare the pants off me. Not for the technically faint of heart (there were times I felt like I was at work coding) the book takes a path that is not impossible...which means it is possible...which means I'm still freaking out a bit after finishing it a few days ago. The ending floored me and I am definitely looking forward to the next in the series.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

A programmer in a big Email hosting company can’t get enough sever capacity for an experimental application that would help craft very effective emails. Frustrated, he inserts some code to enhance the process and unwittingly turns out an effective AI which proceeds to work to protect itself from harm when the programmer discovers what he has loosed on the world. Not bad in a high tech kind of way.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this book thinking that it wasn't my preferred genre but I would give it a shot nonetheless. I'm glad I did. This book had me from the beginning. I enjoyed the characters and could relate even as far fetched as the premise might originally seem. I won't spoil the story. Pick up the book, download it, whatever. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

[Cameron Mulder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great little scifi book. The plot is interesting and the book is fairly fast paced. This is a first novel and it might not have the best writing in the world, but I still found it entertaining and the ideas engaging. The book made me want to read more in the series. If you are interested in scifi and/or the singularity then this is a book you should check out.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book from a first-time novelist. Plausible creation backstory for a strong AI that leads to the most basic drive for all living things: survival. I enjoyed this book so much that I bought the sequel immediately after I finished.