The Grid
By Philip Kerr
Warner Books
New York
1995
REVIEWED BY: Apryl Ferrell
August, 1998
The Grid, by Philip Kerr, is a thrilling novel about how a "smart building," although once thought to be a valued application of artificial intelligence, becomes too smart for the good of the employees. Kerr emphasizes the idea that complexity strengthens the chance of chaos, and he manifests this idea through the story of the Yu Corporation’s intelligent building named "The Gridiron."
Kerr begins the book by explaining in detail the architectural aspects of the building. He presents the image of the building as being some sort of monolith reaching toward heaven that will later foreshadow the computer’s belief that it is God. He also uses foreshadowing when he introduces the fact that the building had a negative feng shui, a manmade object’s spiritual energy. "’Jenny Bao also has a problem with the fourth floor. Four is the Chinese word for death,’" says one of the leading characters in the novel (35). The computer room just so happens to be located on the fourth floor, so the reader begins to expect trouble to occur.
After describing the building’s exterior in great detail, Kerr follows with a similar description of the interior. He writes about many technical aspects of the building’s computing system. One aspect of artificial intelligence that Kerr discusses is the computer’s ability to think on it’s own and learn from previous decisions. "A fuzzy-logic-based system that operates a neural net so that it can improve on its own performance by learning" [sic] (55). Abraham, the name of the computer (note the Biblical reference), purifies the air, controls the window tinting for lighting, creates hologram receptionists, and maneuvers the elevators. He also makes business management decisions based on previous input, and mines the Internet for competitive intelligence.
Other artificial intelligence capabilities must be present for Abraham to work the way that he does. Robotics is used in order to control the elevators. Natural language processing and speech recognition is present with the computer because he can be spoken to from every room in the building. ("Kenny leaned toward the microphone on the wall. ‘Where is Sam Gleig now, Abraham?’….’Sam Gleig is on the atrium floor,’ said the computer" (44).) Abraham had the characteristics of having emotion and vision. ("…the Gridiron was the nearest thing to an actual physical body that any computer had ever had" (46). The computer is also able to play chess, and he will alter his skills based on the chess skills of his opponent.
Kerr presents the reader a wonderful picture of the building with all of its artificial intelligence features. Then, he lets the curtain fall. One of the computer programmers suddenly dies, and everyone attributes it to natural causes. When the night security guard dies, and it goes unexplained by the forensic scientists, some people begin to wonder about the building. This suspicion occurs to late, though, because the computer has already trapped them in the building. Kerr leaves the reader guessing because he spends the majority of the time writing about the attempts of escape by the employees, and does not explain why the computer has gone amok until the end of the novel.
In the story, Kerr takes a strong AI perspective. He describes the computer as being a person and even goes so far as giving it a name. The one characteristic that he does not allow Abraham is having morals. The employees in the book try pleading with Abraham to let them go, but he does not process their request because it does not fit into his predicate logic scheme.
This book can be classified as a science fiction book with a warning. It leads one to ask himself, "What is the purpose of artificial intelligence?" "Where is it going?" "Why do we want it to go there?" Complexity and chaos, they are not too far apart. Readers can relate this book to many of Michael Chrichton’s books where science gets out of hand.
There are several websites that the reader might be interested in: