Jean Tessier’s Reviews > la grande quincaillerie > Status Update

The narrator gives up. We won't know how the story ends: fire or de-escalation. He warns the reader that the future ruled by machines is getting closer. But Armageddon won't be unleashed by machines, but by people and their corridors of power they've created for themselves.

Alexander is really a spy for some secret society. He gets caught by missing a tax payment. A government agent manipulates the Referee into incriminating himself by casting aspersions on his team and his leadership. The Referee threatens the agent, the robot voice tells him RedMath is in open armed rebellion and BluePhys set herself on fire in protest. Fingers on triggers to mutually assured destruction.

First moment of humanity: BluePhys has a crisis of conscience and confides in RedMath. She wants to do a public act of protestation against Project Gamma, but RedMath wont follow.

Parallel between the Redhead disclosing secrets of Project Gamma and its surveillance agenda (1976), and Snowden's revelations of Project PRISM (2013). The author overestimated the public's reaction to these revelations. The Referee begs the automated listening system for privacy, which BluePhys finds dehumanizing. The Referee admits they've already ceded control to the machines.

RedLingo directs a new play where Faust makes a new bargain with the Devil for intellectual power and love. The Devil promises A.I. The Devil shows holograms of various grotesque characters from Hell. BlueMath thinks he's insulting the Referee, others think he's mocking Project Gamma. Alexander wants to produce it at the Electric Circus.

Brainwave meditation. Alexander comes again with a new operations research problem. Teams discuss digital storage solutions and the "latest" improvements. Arguments around the reliability of voice recordings and their impact on the criminality predictor model. Linguistic discussion on passwords vs. coded phrases. The Referee gets angry anytime someone doubts the merits of the Gamma Project.

The Referee and Bluephys have a lovers' quarrel. The author tries to make it sound intellectual, but it is only pretentious. Bluephys is uncomfortable with the human cost of Project Gamma. Everyone is considered a potential criminal.

Alexander works at the circus and the Referee helps him optimize his quick change number. He reduces it to a graph traversal exercise, using the Foulkes Algorithm. Alexander gets a promotion as Super Frégoli, beating the record time of the current performer. This nice bit shows off operations research and linear algebra. I would not have understood before my degree in computing.

Can the surveillance state be automated? Of course it can. But it will have the biases of those who built the system. The computers return a hi-res image of ourselves, not better or worse. I feel the author is out of his depths. Dunning Kruger on full display.

We meet the other team members. Everyone is so pretentious! We get an overview of Project Gamma: listen to phone conversations, do threat assessment based on contents and paralinguistic criteria, and classify as active or virtual delinquents. Tensions are high for no reason. Everyone explodes at the slightest perceived (imagined) slight.