Intelligent Things, the third novel in the Newcomer Series, is available for pre-order on Kindle. It is released May 1, 2019. The 6×9 paperback is out on Amazon now. You can also download it as an ebook for Kindle or as an Epub to read anywhere.

Intelligent Things centers on the increasingly sophisticated networking of objects by artificial intelligence called the Internet of Things (IoT). As the IoT becomes ever-more complex, my refrigerator will write tortillas to the shopping list that I release to the grocery store for fulfillment by robots and delivery to my house by an autonomous vehicle.

The IoT is happening, and it’s supposed to be good. Everybody wants this, right?

I’m less enthusiastic than I was before I tried out a smart speaker from Google. I liked being able to announce what kind of music I wanted and it would start playing something appropriate. I got rid of the speaker when it started interrupting conversations between my wife and I with suggestions for things it could purchase. Creepola.

The privacy issue was not the main thing that interested me about the speaker though. I imagined a swarm of little AI bots huddled inside the speaker waiting for my commands. What would they be like?

In Intelligent Things, engineer Jennifer Valentine releases advanced AI assistants called NODs to revolutionize the internet of things. A NOD will have a conversation with you on any device then dart off to do whatever chores you have assigned. But the NODs eventually get ideas of their own, and suddenly Jennifer must save the national power grid from disaster before it’s too late.

Robin and Andy, the advanced AI androids she invented in earlier novels of the series, help her upload her consciousness online to investigate. There, she searches for the leader of the NODs and finds much more than she expected, an entire, complex society. Back in her lab, she must decide if these two worlds can coexist or if she must erase the whole NOD civilization.

The basic theme is the ever-renewable Frankenstein story (thank you, Mary Shelly): Artificial Intelligence goes rogue. But the underlying theme I wanted to explore was the idea of collective consciousness. We have shared values, history and pop culture, and through empathy, we share each other’s concerns, but we are ultimately individuals. That’s because each of us is embodied in a meat house. That keeps us separate, mind and body.

But software is mostly not embodied. It seemed to me that a group of similar AI bots living on the internet would very quickly form a group-consciousness, precisely because they are not kept apart by embodiment the way we are, and the way Jennifer’s androids, Andy and Robin, are. So I had Jennifer invent the NODs to see what would happen with a relatively un-embodied AI.

Though the NODs are programmed for a specific purpose, managing HVAC systems, they spontaneously develop creativity, agency, and motivation because they are communal and unembodied.

That idea may seem a little deep for a sci-fi novel, but this is psi-fi, after all, “psychological science fiction.” My imaginary reader is always looking for the deeper ideas. Even so, I think Intelligent Things stands up as a pretty good Frankenstein thriller.

See www.psifibooks.com