Prey

“But then, things never turn out the way you think they will.”

From the outset of the novel, Jack’s worldview is obvious. He consistently reiterates the part uncertainty plays in any plan. This can apply to his unlikely role as a stay-at-home father, his wife’s venture into the desert to help create the swarms, or the unpredictability of evolution. He trusts in meticulous approaches more than in confident hypotheses.

“I thought there was something about a mother’s caring that a father could never match. Julia had some connection to the kids that I never would. Or at least a different connection.”

Before he began staying at home with his kids, Jack had a romanticized notion of Julia’s innate superiority as a parent. As a full-time parent, he begins to learn that her parenting style is not inherently superior to his own. The real Julia is a good mother, though, which is what makes her erratic behavior more noticeable when she begins to change. Later, he will be relieved to learn that Julia did not change her behavior willingly or experience a psychotic break: She was being controlled by the particles.

“Sometimes you can’t think about painful things, you can’t make your mind focus on them. Your brain just slips away, no thank you, let’s change the subject.”

Jack contemplates the human inclination to escape from mental pain. Solving difficult problems requires dedication, focus, and a tolerance for uncertainty. Jack is thoughtful enough to work painstakingly through his projects, but outside of professional concerns, it is not so easy. His suspicions about Julia’s infidelity make him want distraction at all costs.

“Kids are more advanced these days. The teenage years now start at eleven.”

Jack’s remark about kids appears to be a tongue-in-cheek, throwaway joke. However, it alludes to the evolutionary acceleration present throughout the rest of the story. His preteens do have access to more information than the previous generation of preteens did. This will have implications for the future, although the consequences will probably only be clear through a historical lens.

“If they were all concerned, why didn’t they do something about it? But of course, that’s human nature. Nobody does anything until it’s too late. We put the stoplight at the intersection after the kid is killed.”

One of Jack’s major frustrations with human nature is its reactionary nature. With some foresight and pre-design questioning, the need for a stoplight at a busy intersection could be obvious. However, much of what is called progress is a response to avoidable catastrophes and tragedies. Picking up the pieces after an accident creates a huge opportunity cost, as opposed to putting in the time to prevent the accident in the first place.

“You undercut me, you sabotage me, you turn the children against me […] I see what you’re doing. Don’t think I don’t. You’re not supportive of me at all.”

Julia accuses Jack of shutting her out and alienating her from the children. This is the most irrational he has ever seen her, especially given that her own behavior is the alienating factor in her family relationships. At the same time, the scene foreshadows the eventual revelation that the particles are corrupting her and altering her behavior and appearance. But at this point, her comments are frightening and threatening, exacerbating Jack’s fears that they will divorce.

“Hot fields move fast. Six months can make or break a company.” 

Jack’s headhunter, Annie Gerard, explains that he does not have time to waste. The fortune of a company can experience drastic swings in six months. She describes a similar pressure as that felt by Julia and Ricky as they scramble to save Xymos amidst problems of their own creation. During the brief window of a company’s startup, venture capitalists must be impressed, or they move on to more profitable projects. This comment speaks to the role of capitalism in Reckless Technological Innovation.

“The human brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe, but brains still know very little about themselves.”

Jack thinks about the irony that people cannot apply their psychological insights to themselves. The brain is a fallible tool, but it is still the only tool with which people can examine and observe their own minds. A brain monitoring a brain faces a challenge analogous to observing microscopic details through a lens that is always smudged.

“I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”

After the car accident, Julia is delirious. When she tells Jack that she didn’t mean to do anything wrong, it is her talking and not the nanobots inside her. Under the influence of the anesthesia and the shock of her injuries, she has enough awareness to recognize her mistakes in the disaster at the laboratory. Her qualification—that she didn’t mean to do anything wrong—touches on the Tragic Downsides of Professional Ambition: Overriding protocol for the sake of progress can have disastrous results despite good intentions.

“It was the opinion of the psychiatric consult that your wife was suffering from a bipolar disorder, or a drug disorder, or both.”

The doctor tells Jack that Julia’s condition concerns them. Her psychiatric evaluation indicates that her erratic behavior is consistent with bipolar disorder and/or drug use. This foreshadows the reveal that she is, in fact, split between two modes of personality: There is the real Julia, and there is the swarm inside her that influences her words and responses.

“Sometimes agents were so influenced by one another that they lost track of their goal and did something else instead. In that sense, the program was very childlike, unpredictable and easily distracted. As one programmer put it, ‘Trying to program distributed intelligence is like telling a five-year-old kid to go to his room and change his clothes. He may do that, but he is equally likely to do something else and never return.’”

Jack highlights one of the difficulties—and dangers—of creating agents that can gain autonomy. The agents are occasionally haphazard in their approach to problem-solving, like the child in the quote. However, the unpredictability of a child as it works to solve a problem is unlikely to lead to large-scale harm. The forgetfulness and distractibility of the nanobot swarms makes their actions both consequential and difficult to anticipate.

“Technologies were a form of knowledge, and like all knowledge, technologies grew, evolved, matured. To believe otherwise was to believe that the Wright brothers could build a rocket and fly to the moon instead of flying three hundred feet over sand dunes at Kitty Hawk. Nanotechnology was still at the Kitty Hawk stage.”

Jack is skeptical of Ricky’s claims that they have created assemblers. He knows that gains of this magnitude simply don’t happen in large steps. However, people like Ricky, while they may start off with good intentions, make grandiose assumptions about their progress, ignore warning signals and caution, and assume that any problems that arise can be handled later. They may have made the technological breakthrough, but they haven’t maintained the control to match it.

“‘Swarming’ was a term for the behavior of certain social insects like ants or bees, which swarmed whenever the hive moved to a new site.”

When Jack first sees the swarm, it reminds him of the bees and ants that he has studied. In Part 3, he will learn that he is more correct than he knows. The swarms did create a nest, and their nest serves a function like those built by bees and ants, incubating future generations. The particles may be programmed by humans, but they act as social creatures that are functionally alive.

“Systems experienced a long, slow starting period, followed by ever-increasing speed. You could see that exact speedup in the evolution of life on earth.”

Every complicated system begins with relative inertia. Jack uses the evolution of life as an example. Billions of years passed with nothing but single-celled organisms on earth. As evolution into more complex life-forms began, it accelerated. The distance between humanlike hominids and the people running the Nevada lab is nothing compared to the billions of years between single- and multi-celled lifeforms. Jack knows that while the swarms are still in their infancy, their rate of evolution will speed up to unmanageable levels.

“Animals like zebras and caribou didn’t live in herds because they were sociable; herding was a defense against predation. Large numbers of animals provided increased vigilance. And attacking predators were often confused when the herd fled in all directions.”

As Jack tries to figure out how to outsmart the swarm, he thinks of his team as a herd of animals. If the swarm operates similarly to typical predators, it will focus on anyone who appears weak or can be singled out at a distance from the herd. If Jack can get his team to act as one organism, both in its movements and in its proximity, it may confuse and paralyze the swarm, since it will not have an obvious target. 

“Psychologists now believed a certain amount of random behavior was necessary for innovation. You couldn’t be creative without striking out in new directions, and those directions were likely to be random.”

Uncertainty is required for progress. When scientists experiment and project models, their experiments are constrained by the amount of variables the scientists can imagine and control for. Random results may be frustrating in their unpredictability, but they may also provide the most useful, consequential avenues of inquiry. At Xymos, the scientists have neglected to control for uncertainty.

“The old ideas about survival of the fittest had gone out of fashion long ago. Those views were too simpleminded. Nineteenth-century thinkers saw evolution as 'nature red in tooth and claw,' envisioning a world where strong animals killed weaker ones. They didn't take into account that the weaker ones would inevitably get stronger, or fight back in some other way. Which of course they always do.”

The “survival of the fittest” framework assumes a helpless passivity in life-forms that are weaker than their predators. Over enough time, the accumulative resistance of the weaker forms forces new types of evolution, which the 19th-century thinkers did not include in their theorems. The swarms begin as weaker units but are quickly able to threaten the stronger humans that created them—just as Jack then tries to adapt his team’s behavior to navigate theirs.

“A human being is actually a giant swarm. Or more precisely, it’s a swarm of swarms, because each organ—blood, liver, kidneys—is a separate swarm. What we refer to as a ‘body’ is really the combination of all these organ swarms.”

Even though the 3D mimicry is advanced, Jack knows that it is a logical solution to the problems the particles are trying to solve. They are acting in tandem, without a leader—like the body’s organs—to survive and thrive. Jack is also touching again on the illusion of control humans have—in actuality, they have very little control over their own bodies, much less over their surroundings and other entities.

“There’s an argument that the whole structure of consciousness, and the human sense of self-control and purposefulness, is a user illusion.

We don’t have conscious control over ourselves at all. We just think we do.”

Jack contemplates the arguments that free will is an illusion and that organisms can never be sure of the source of their motivations. Any sense of conscious control aligns with the identify of a self. Now Jack worries that the swarm may have an identity that it wishes to protect, even if it is unaware that it is merely acting out its programming.

“Human beings expected to find a central command in any organization. States had governments. Corporations had CEOs. Schools had principals. Armies had generals. Human beings tended to believe that without central command, chaos would overwhelm the organization and nothing significant could be accomplished.”

Jack watches the particles drag Rosie’s body toward the nest. The nest startles them all, but particularly Mae, whose primary work is with primates and not insects—who, like the particles, work effectively without a centralized command center. They are getting the results they want, but no one is giving them orders. They have a narrower set of goals than people typically do and are less likely to be distracted.

“Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything—evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing—it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing.”

In Jack’s view, there is no such thing as a static state in nature. Not only is evolution constant, but it also cannot be stopped. The human perspective is finite and limited to practical needs and physical appetites. The rapid evolution of the self-taught swarms provides a useful contrast between the relative inertia of human evolution and the speed of a sophisticated algorithm.

“I try to keep a brave face for the kids, but of course you can’t fool kids. They know I’m frightened.”

After Jack returns home, he has ringing in his ears and a pain in his chest. He gives them all the virus, which makes them sick. His children have spent enough time at home with him to know that he is scared. After Julia’s deception over the past few months, it is a relief for Jack to simply be honest with his children, even though it is not always a comfort for them.

“But it was one thing to release a population of virtual agents inside a computer’s memory to solve a problem. It was another thing to set real agents free in the real world.”

No matter how sophisticated computer modeling becomes, it will never guarantee complete certainty when algorithms or programs are applied to reality. The reason for digital models is to experiment while stakes are low and lives are not at risk. However, the modeling stage is rarely what produces profits and fame. People like Ricky convince themselves that the models are too reliable too soon.