BOOK REVIEW: Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution
by Peter W. Singer and August Cole
Reviewed by Niloofar Razi Howe
Niloofar Razi Howe is a cybersecurity and technology executive, investor and board member. She currently serves as Sr. Operating Partner at Energy Impact Partners, Sr. Fellow at New America, and Board Member at Recorded Future, Morgan Stanley Bank, and Board Chair at IREX.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall,” wrote Harvard sociobiology professor E.O. Wilson about a decade ago.
In their new novel, Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution, Peter W. Singer and August Cole deliver a page-turning techno-thriller that perfectly captures the collision between triggered paleolithic emotions and god-like technology and the existential crisis that can ensue as a result. For anyone searching for a worthy escapist quarantine read that will challenge, entertain and cause you to think long and hard about this fast turn we are taking into a world driven by artificial intelligence and automation, only accelerated by the COVID-19 lockdown, this is your book.
Burn-In’s story centers around FBI agent Lara Keegan and her new partner, a robot named TAMS (Tactical Autonomous Mobility System), who are tasked with investigating a series of technology related crimes wreaking real-world havoc on Washington DC (imagine Georgetown waterfront getting submerged as a result of a system hack). Unlike the way techno-thriller characters are often portrayed, Keegan is eminently relatable—she is hard charging and indomitable, but has a bad back that impedes her ability to run down criminals. She works for the government but has real disdain for bureaucracy, challenging and even overriding authority when necessary to get the job done. And while she can use her intellect, experience and intuition to spot terrorists and understand their motives, she can’t figure out how to save her marriage and struggles with being both a committed FBI agent and a present and empathetic mom to a little girl.
Keegan’s struggles with her new partner TAMS are equally poignant as she tries to understand human-robot opportunities and boundaries. The way she handles this leads to a series of philosophic conversations with an FBI psychologist who may not be all that he seems. Reflecting on her partnership with TAMS, she observes at one point: “It seems like ‘knowing’ something is a state. But TAMS is always going to be changing, given the data fire hose it’s drinking from. Does it have any actual knowledge or is it just always going to be data input and output? AI may be modeled after our brains, but what we observe is limited to such a dramatically narrower data set than what TAMS can register. I think that limitation, that very uncertainty, is exactly what makes it possible to know something. That there’s actually so much that we don’t know is what gives us the kind of conviction on certain things that no machine would ever be satisfied with.”
Yet, the book is more than a novel. Burn-In’s human vs. machine narrative is set in the near future and its technologically driven scenarios are meticulously researched, documented and sourced, replete with the nonfiction end notes to back them up. This makes the book all that much more intriguing and terrifying to the reader. Every disaster that takes place in the novel could actually happen if the right adversary set their mind to it. The novel thus perfectly captures the double-edged sword that is technology—the good and the bad-- as Keegan and TAMS race around some of the most iconic spots in Washington DC (including a great chase scene that starts inside Ben’s Chili Bowl) trying to stop the next disaster.
In turn, we are repeatedly pulled into the real ethical challenges of technology, AI and automation, and how the accelerating pace of technology innovation for the first time in human history, is outstripping our ability as humans to adapt, adjust our policies on a timeline that is meaningful, and avoid the inevitable widening of the income divide in society that this acceleration will drive.
Automation has been diminishing the importance of labor over time, adding to income disparity between the highest earners and the low-wage labor force, reinforcing a belief for many in our society that the future will not be better for them or their children. In fact, an Oxford University study estimated that 47% of total US employment is at risk with automation. These societal tensions explored in the novel are not new and Burn-In makes that clear when one of the characters references the late Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark, published in 1995, in which Sagan writes of having a foreboding of an America that is an information economy, its industries having slipped away to other countries, with technological powers in the hands of a few, and a political system unable to grapple with the issues on a timeline that is relevant. Sagan goes on to predict that human critical faculties will decline as we become unable to distinguish between what feels good and what is true and we slide, “almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” In many ways, it feels as if that moment Sagan warned about has come, with Burn-In then asking what it would be like.
As in their previous novel Ghost Fleet, Singer and Cole use a technique called “useful fiction” or FICINT to drive their narrative. While readers may be familiar with the concept of HUMINT (Human Intelligence) and SIGINT (Signals Intelligence), few may have come across the term FICINT. FICINT is the fusion of fiction writing with intelligence research and analysis, to imagine future scenarios grounded in reality (so, there is no made up tech) and then learn from the experience. Using FICINT, the authors tackle complex concepts like AI, automation, robotics, consumerism, elitism and even government surveillance, all the while taking the reader on a suspenseful and action-packed journey they have not been on before. The value is that the authors bring the scenarios to life in a way no White Paper or report ever could. Not only does this technique make the work accessible to a broader audience, but it can also be more effective in forcing conversation around these topics. Perhaps that’s why the US Government’s Cyberspace Solarium Commission Report, a 174-page document that lays out a strategy for securing Cyberspace starts with a forward titled, A Warning from Tomorrow by Peter W. Singer and August Cole. This “warning from tomorrow” is actually a synopsis of the aftermath of the events that take place in this novel. The Commission recognized that the fictional scenarios contained in this novel, all grounded in real technology, can spark the imagination in a way no other technique can.
Timely and compelling as it is entertaining, Burn-In raises important issues and will provoke the necessary conversations that must happen about humanity and the future we want as we embrace technology at an ever-accelerating pace.
This book earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
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