Book overview
For readers of Kim Stanley Robinson, Ursula Le Guin, and Vernor Vinge--a near-future political science-fiction thriller about the one threat we can't engineer our way out of: ourselves.
Across thirty-six years and six continents, the liberal order is dying, and seven strangers are building what comes next. A tech visionary and an engineer who thinks through his body. An intelligence analyst radicalized by a murder. A trafficking survivor who raises a criminal empire on synesthesia and the voices of the dead. A child soldier who feels human emotion like weather.
From their collisions rise rival operating systems for civilization itself: mesh networks keyed to children's biometrics, AI churches that resurrect the dead, a regime that rewrites dissent at the neurochemical level.
As augmented reality shatters perception, one question remains--not who holds power, but whether we still share enough truth to survive.
"Dmitri Mehlhorn wants you to know, from the novel's very first pages, that the stakes are high, they're visceral, and that sooner than many anticipate, the impact of our current technological revolution will land like an elbow to the temple on our apps, our institutions, and ultimately individual cognitive liberty itself. . . . Free societies must evolve to survive the speed of autocracy without becoming autocratic themselves. Archipelago of Light showcases and dramatizes this state of affairs and tests solutions--including solutions that carry devastating moral costs. A deeply imagined and intellectually provocative vision of the world to come."
-- Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, Manas AI, and Inflection AI and author of Superagency, from the foreword
Across thirty-six years and six continents, the liberal order is dying, and seven strangers are building what comes next. A tech visionary and an engineer who thinks through his body. An intelligence analyst radicalized by a murder. A trafficking survivor who raises a criminal empire on synesthesia and the voices of the dead. A child soldier who feels human emotion like weather.
From their collisions rise rival operating systems for civilization itself: mesh networks keyed to children's biometrics, AI churches that resurrect the dead, a regime that rewrites dissent at the neurochemical level.
As augmented reality shatters perception, one question remains--not who holds power, but whether we still share enough truth to survive.
"Dmitri Mehlhorn wants you to know, from the novel's very first pages, that the stakes are high, they're visceral, and that sooner than many anticipate, the impact of our current technological revolution will land like an elbow to the temple on our apps, our institutions, and ultimately individual cognitive liberty itself. . . . Free societies must evolve to survive the speed of autocracy without becoming autocratic themselves. Archipelago of Light showcases and dramatizes this state of affairs and tests solutions--including solutions that carry devastating moral costs. A deeply imagined and intellectually provocative vision of the world to come."
-- Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, Manas AI, and Inflection AI and author of Superagency, from the foreword