Review: Rogue by Design: A Department of Misconfigured Intelligence Mystery

Rogue by Design: A Department of Misconfigured Intelligence Mystery by Alex Ambler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is really good, but probably has a limited audience (though one that's growing), and for me was brought down by some tricks of rhetoric used a few too many times for me to keep enjoying them.

It pulls off the difficult feat of turning a bureaucratic investigation of something quite technical into an interesting and compelling plot. The Department of Misconfigured Intelligence is, in the 2050s, tasked with investigating AI that is not performing in the best interests of its users, and this book follows an unfolding investigation of intelligent homes that are starting to restrict the lives of their adult occupants in a paternalistic, infantilising, for-your-own-good kind of way. The burning question is who has told them to and why, and it gets answered in an intriguing and unexpected fashion.

I don't read a lot of SF anymore. I'm more of a fantasy reader, even though I work in technology. This, though, is about the world of technology that I work in; the narrator and lead investigator is a former systems architect whose previous commercial work is the foundation of the very system he's investigating, and the way he and his colleagues approach the investigation is the way I do troubleshooting (but with lawyers), and the values they hold are the very best version of engineering values. Also, the technology is both believable and kind of not the point; the point is that these are systems that interact closely with human beings every day, and that interaction is where the problem lies. And in our current world of rising AI usage, it's a very relevant story. It's a mystery, too, which is the other genre I read a lot.

One reason I don't read much SF anymore is that I look in my preferred fiction for what Dorothy's companions were looking for: a brain, a heart and some courage, and a lot of SF lacks at least one of those, usually the heart (though not infrequently the brain). This has plenty of heart; the narrator and his colleagues and family, and for that matter the complainants, are lovely people who care about doing the right thing. It has perhaps more than enough brain, since you need to be alert to follow it, and it gets pretty abstract at times. And it has the courage to attempt something difficult and timely and yet not merely zeitgeisty, and largely pulls it off.

I say "largely" because it does have its faults, which kept it from quite getting five stars from me. One of the biggest is that it has what I call Scalzi characters: barely or, mostly, not at all described, diverse only in their names and distinguishable largely by their plot roles, and all with the exact same voice. Some of them are not introduced before they start being talked about as if the reader knows who they are.

I mentioned above that there are certain rhetorical tics and tricks that get, to my mind, overused. "Weather," for example, is used as a metaphor so often it loses its meaning, which I think is probably something like "varying environmental conditions that you just have to work with," except that doesn't fit every usage. Everyone says sentences of the form, "An X with a Y isn't a Z; it's an A with opinions." There are four or five of these snowclones, and by the end I was finding them tedious and even a little pretentious, not to mention that they were obscuring the meaning of sentences by being clever instead of relevant. And the fact that so many of the characters (not just the investigator and his colleagues, who might have influenced each other, but some of the complainants, who hardly know them) use the same verbal tics is a fault in itself.

In the version I had from Netgalley for review, the copy editing is almost flawless, except for the consistent non-observance of a specific punctuation convention: when the person speaking carries on speaking in the next paragraph, the first paragraph should not close the quotation marks.

If you're interested in AI and where it might take us, work as or with an engineer, and/or want to follow a complex, compelling investigation of something quite abstract but with clearly shown impact on human beings and a strong emotional arc, this is a terrific book. The prose style could stand to be simpler, from my perspective, but that's partly a matter of taste. The points it's making about work and how it's performed or should be performed, about AI, about values, about freedom and control and how those get balanced, and about responsibility are clear, profound and thought-provoking, and I'll be recommending it to friends and colleagues.

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