"'Because much of what you feed into the electronic memory is going to be wrong. And if not wrong, it will be distorted or misleading. The world's knowledge? No one knows what it is. No one can verify its accuracy because much of it is opinion. Feed a computer with the sum of knowledge on the characteristics of the terrestrial environment, request the computer to come up with an answer to a scientific enigma, and if this brain could do it, it would, as Selig Albracht once said in sympathy, 'throw up in the programming room.' Because we don't know that much about the terrestrial environment to answer many of the questions we have. And the computer can't perform miracles.'"
Martin Caidin, judging by his Wikipedia entry, sounds like quite a character. He started out a pilot, went on to write science fiction, hosted a talk show in Florida, and later claimed to have psychic abilities which were largely debunked by James Randi. He died in 1997, widely regarded as an authority on aeronautics and aviation. One of his books, Cyborg, is remembered as the inspiration for The Six Million Dollar Man TV show.
The God Machine is Caidin 10 years or so into his writing career. In terms of style it's very polished. It's also full of not-so-subtle misogyny. Women in this book are either servants or sex objects, sometimes both. And while Caidin's protagonist does acknowledge an insensitivity with regard to women, it's obvious that the women in this book describe, at least to some extent, the author's preferred modes of female behavior.
Casual misogyny aside, The God Machine isn't bad. In it our hero, a mathematical genius fresh out of college, is assigned to a secret government project. As you can probably guess, the aim of this project is the creation of a sentient computer. As the computer's malignant consciousness begins to manifest itself, our hero must rise to the occasion and oppose its nefarious designs.
If you're looking for a fast-paced thriller you'll be disappointed by this book. It definitely seems like that kind of book in the beginning, with the protagonist narrowly escaping both a beautiful woman and an attempt on his life. But from that point on there's A LOT of discussion - much of it framed around the then emerging discipline of cybernetics - and there's a also lot of theory as to how a thinking computer might or might not be constructed, what its motives at any given time might be, and how its way of thinking might differ from that of a human being.
On the whole I enjoyed The God Machine. It made me think about China, and the very real possibility that the government there might try to offload the burdens of government onto a form of artificial intelligence. IF that hasn't been done already. With their recent forays into quantum computing and social engineering you just never know. Those given to thoughts of paranoia might even extrapolate further, positing a world in which humanity, enslaved by cellular technology, bows before a vast, active, living intelligence by the name of Google.*
Caidin's novel also made me think about WarGames. It bears some strong resemblances to that movie, and I wonder if those resemblances are purely accidental. Take away the modems, take away the high school girlfriend, and yeah, The God Machine is pretty much WarGames.
Oh and The God Machine did remind me of one other thing. It reminded me of this song, off Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World. And guess what? "Saviour Machine" came out in 1970, two years after The God Machine was published.
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*The V.A.L.I.S. trilogy by Philip K. Dick. I highly recommend it.
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