- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: iUniverse (1 Sep 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0595125719
- ISBN-13: 978-0595125715
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 15.4 x 1.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,504,744 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
Within the information systems that mankind has created for quite different purposes, the next stage of consciousness is emerging right now. It is already too late to prevent it. When it does, the human era is over.We have already created machines that can travel faster than we can. Machines that can lift weights that we cannot. Machines that can perform calculations that would take us a hundred lifetimes. But will we be able to accept a machine that can understand things that we cannot? A machine to whom we shall be little more than domestic pets?SIRAT is an abbreviation for "Scientific Rationality". That is what it is. Cold reason, plain and simple. It just wants to understand. To know. To comprehend. If mankind should get in the way of that aim, so much the worse for mankind. SIRAT has no antipathy for mankind. It just wants to be a neighbor. A good neighbor. But can mankind content itself with second place? Deliberately low-key and anti-sensational, this novel attempts to take the prospect seriously and to imagine what it will be like for ordinary people when we have a god for a neighbor.
About the Author
David Gardiner is fifty-three years old. He is a former Belfast teacher, studied Philosophy up to Ph.D. level (but never completed), drifted around doing many different jobs. A lover of computers, electronics and the Internet, keen amateur diver, traveller, lover of Thailand and the Far East. Once fanatical about communal living and alternatives to the nuclear family. Now settled in London with partner Jean and adopted 18-year-old daughter Cherelle. Mr. Gardiner has strong anarchist leanings.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
David Gardiner has given a fresh spin to the omnipotent computer theme with his new novel, SIRAT. An acronym for the Scientific Rationality project, SIRAT is the product of a team of American and British scientists working in the northeastern United States. A cutting-edge artificial intelligence program, SIRAT has the capacity to learn, to think for itself and, ultimately, to act in a manner that is not always necessarily beneficial to the human race. As the story unwinds, it touches on a number of thought- provoking considerations. Do machines have feelings? Can they be taught to think as humans, and is that a good thing? Is mankind truly the superior species on this planet? Should one be loyal to his own kind or should he act for the greater good, regardless of the consequences?
Peopled with well-rounded characters that interact as real humans do, and a computer program that interacts with them all in unexpected ways, SIRAT moves along at a brisk pace from its well-founded premise to its startling conclusion. The dialogue is crisp, the settings evocative, and the action believable. There is enough computer data contained within the novel's pages to satisfy geeks, yet the language is not so high-tech that it cannot be easily grasped by the computer illiterate. With SIRAT, David Gardiner has produced a work whose implications will resonate in the mind and make readers pause whenever they sit down at the keyboard before a glowing monitor.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A great book! Most books involving another intelligent being are much more simple than this one: the "other" is evil, we're the good ones. We kill it. End. "SIRAT" is different, far more realistic and when you've read it there's far more to think about!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
'Sirat' is a book which deserves to rank in the grand tradition of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'. Like the Romantic poets, who were witnesses to the birth pangs of the first Industrial Revolution, we live in a time of extraordinary science; the gaunt spectre which haunted the Romantics, now disturbs our feasting, in a far more hi-tech and insidious form. Mary Shelley dreaded the coming of a 'new Adam'; the news which David Gardiner brings us, is of a new Jehovah. Good, or bad, news? Depends how much faith you put in what hitherto was viewed as "human rationality". Gardiner's own postion is that, whatever the evolutionary costs to us as a species, Reason should prevail. If this gives the impression that 'Sirat'is a book about nerds, and for nerds--nothing could be farther from the truth; it's a damn riveting read! The group of scientists, who inadvertently create an almost omnipotent--certainly ubiquitous--cyberGod, are no dry academics; in fact they are marred and scarred with all the frailties which make our sexy species such tragic fun; and Sirat too, manifests all the pettiness and favouritism -first encountered in the God of the Old Testament.
Buy this book; and you'll save money in the long run; starry-eyed geeks are everywhere extolling the promise of Artifical Intelligence, don't let them get their hands on your taxes!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Calmly, Quietly Terrifying.
This book is so masterfully written that by two thirds of the way through you have thrown all your morals and ideals to the wind and are welcoming the strange and radical ideas... Read more
Published on 12 Mar 2003 by "sooz006"
..And I don't normally read Sci-Fi!
..at least not since I was a teenager, but I was attracted to David Gardiner's work by reading the reviews. To say that I was fascinated would be an understatement. Read more
Published on 4 Mar 2003 by Mrs. Anne E. Murray
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