Books: "Burn-In"
This "non-fiction" thriller depicts what life with ubiquitous robots and interconnected AI could be like.
Burn In is a “non-fiction novel” whose authors — P.W. Singer, a political scientist, and August Cole, a national-security consultant — portray a near-future full of robots that are actually likely.
It’s a future in which a hard-working FBI agent gets a greasy lunch she didn’t order — because her robot partner sensed her “posture and respiratory rate indicated lower blood sugar levels.” (It’s a Reuben sandwich, which “matches observed preferences for food type, but avoids repeating a past meal”; the robot warns her not to eat meat later in the month, though, because processing plants around the nation are starting to report signs of a salmonella outbreak.) Most cars are self-driving, but traffic jams still occur — because cars from one manufacturer conspire to slow down cars made by a rival. Get-well cards burst into song when they detect that their recipient is looking at them, and toys hover (literally) over children, talking to them and entertaining them (and, of course, hoovering up data about them).
Such is the day-to-day of agent Lara Keegan, a standard-issue thriller cop (tough and smart, with a dark secret, a troubled home life, and a case that higher-ups want to shut down, and so on). As the book begins she’s stuck with a new partner she doesn’t like, because it’s a robot. Her new sidekick walks, talks, crunches data and never makes the same mistake twice. But it’s untested in real-life conditions, and Keegan has been assigned to run a “burn in” — driving the new device hard, to see when and how it fails.
Because it is constantly lapping up data from everywhere and everyone — “sensors in their vizglasses. Sensors in their heartburn medicine. Implants in their house. Implants near their kidneys. Chips in their cats. Chips in their chips’’ — the machine can suss out connections that help crack the case. But when Keegan tells it to climb a rope, it dangles high above after it succeeds. After all, no one told it anything about getting back down. (In one of the biggest departure’s from today’s reality, Singer and Cole give the robot impressive abilities to run, walk and jump that will come as a surprise to anyone who has watched real biped robots.)
Singer and Cole ably deliver the goods you expect in this genre, as agent Keegan struggles with political schemers, crafty moguls, and crooks who aren’t what they seem. But the subtler and more original story they tell is of psychic adaptation, as Keegan learns how to work with a machine that receives and processes immense amounts of data, but has no common sense. Will it uncover her secret? Part of her motivation to understand it is her need to work around its data-crunching powers.
Society in the story has been adapting too. Now that everything is AI-infused and interconnected, daily life is convenient and all-too-informed in trivial ways. But it has become even more unequal and ramshackle than today’s. Singer and Cole skillfully trace the effects of this tech-driven economic change on private life. Keegan is married to a lawyer whose work has been automated, so he’s been pitched out of the L.L. Bean-second-home-private-school cohort he’d expected to join. As the novel begins, he’s doing micro-jobs that robots and algorithms can’t yet do — an Amazon Turk kind of life that has left him embittered drugged-out.
There are gestures of resistance to tech domination. Colleges have machine-free zones for students, which make their parents nervous (a nice observation — we all hate surveillance tech unless we’re using it on someone else). Some hard-core activists use special skin lotions whose properties mess with facial-recognition algorithms. But most people accept a world in which they are both targets and users of agents that surveille, analyze and predict their every move.
Don’t be misled by the “non-fiction novel” fig leaf. Singer and Cole are real novelists. They manage plot and pacing well, and their characters aren’t cardboard. Burn In is a thoughtful book that’s also narratively and emotionally satisfying.
Is it a good forecast of the robot-infused future? Well, as Niels Bohr said, prediction is difficult, especially of the future. But the book’s is a better informed guess than most. In many moments, you can see the logical extension of habits and technology that we’ve already largely adopted in the rich world, where societies are organized around the dictates of unvarnished capitalism. The characters don’t talk self-consciously about the tech they use; they just use it. They also don’t cower in fear before machine overlords. Robots in the book are often unobtrusive, inoffensive, time-saving. This probably is how robots will make their way into our daily lives — not with a clang but with a simper.
There was one aspect of Burn In, though, that I found unrealistic: The absence of what the late philosopher José A. Benardete called "sludge” — the accidents, unintended consequences and entropy that frustrate all human efforts. In every human activity our tools fail to work as planned and often get in one another’s way.
Though they promise “seamless” experiences and “frictionless” transactions, digital tools throw lots of sludge. (You text your spouse “I am leaving now” and autocorrect sends “I am leaving you.” Files you stored only in the cloud suddenly fill up your computer drive, because the company that runs those cloud servers changed its policies without notice. You want to send an email by noon but you’re going to have to wait — the latest update of your software isn’t yet compatible with the newest version of your operating system.)
When things are connected and run digitally, software sludge ends up gumming up physical objects. You glance at your smartwatch for the time and discover it can’t tell you that right now, because it’s getting a firmware update. People with “smart” lightbulbs find themselves in darkness after their router goes down. Pilots of a Boeing 737 find their plane lurching downwards despite their commands, and crash as they search a manual for the reason.
Digital sludge will certainly be part of our robot-full future. But it’s missing from Burn In. When Keegan thinks “machines were built on assumptions that meant one thing in a lab and another in a narrow alley reeking of dog shit and gunpowder,” it’s because she sees a way to exploit the robot’s algorithms. There’s no hint that the algorithms won’t work as planned. And that absence — far more than its skin-of-our-teeth escapes and villainous senators and amazing coincidences — made Burn In feel not-quite-of-the-real-world. to me.
Still, this is a lively, engaging, well-informed book, and a good introduction to the robotic future just over the horizon.