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A review by librarian_of_trantor
Three Laws Lethal by David Walton
2.0
I almost quit reading early on because the exposition was so clunky. E. g., they are presenting business plan for self driving car company to investor and go on and on with statistics on traffic fatalities and the advantage of self driving cars. Of course, the investor, like the reader (me at least), already knows all this and just wants to know how they can make it happen and make her money.And the author went a bit overboard with two of the characters swapping SFF book and movie references.
But I stuck with it and the middle was fairly interesting. A novel and plausible way for how the AI driving the cars could inadvertently become sentient. But when the AI hits the "I think therefore I am, but what am I" stage the author runs that on for too long. And one of the main (human) characters has a descent into madness and villandry that a bit too much to swallow. And after all the exposition about the safety and benefit of self driving cars, the AI kills a couple people in what could be considered self defense, then a bunch more through programing problem created by humans, then is set up to kill hundreds more through human maleficence. That doesn't make one want to jump into self driving cars.
But I stuck with it and the middle was fairly interesting. A novel and plausible way for how the AI driving the cars could inadvertently become sentient. But when the AI hits the "I think therefore I am, but what am I" stage the author runs that on for too long. And one of the main (human) characters has a descent into madness and villandry that a bit too much to swallow. And after all the exposition about the safety and benefit of self driving cars, the AI kills a couple people in what could be considered self defense, then a bunch more through programing problem created by humans, then is set up to kill hundreds more through human maleficence. That doesn't make one want to jump into self driving cars.