Amazon David Gardiner's Home Page Category:  Science Fiction Publisher: iUniverse ISBN-10:  0595125719 Type: Fiction Pages: 208 Copyright: Sep 1 2000 Within the information systems that mankind has created for quite different purposes, the next stage of consciousness is emerging right now. It is already too late to prevent it. When it does, the human era is over. We have already created machines that can travel faster than we can. Machines that can lift weights that we cannot. Machines that can perform calculations that would take us a hundred lifetimes. But will we be able to accept a machine that can understand things that we cannot? A machine to whom we shall be little more than domestic pets? Deliberately low-key and anti-sensational, this novel attempts to take the prospect seriously and to imagine what it will be like for ordinary people when we have a god for a neighbor. Excerpt nihil magnum in terra praeter hominem, nihil magnum in homine praeter mentem On earth there is nothing great but man, and in man there is nothing great but mind. Favorinus of Arelate (2nd Century AD)

Jack Ewing (author of Freak-Out and Kissing Asphalt )
David Gardiner has given a new spin to the omnipotent computer theme with his new novel, SIRAT. An acronym for the Scientific Rationality project, SIRAT is the product of a team of American and British scientists working in the northeastern United States. A cutting-edge artificial intelligence program, SIRAT has the capacity to learn, to think for itself and, ultimately, to act in a manner that is not always necessarily beneficial to the human race. As the story unwinds, it touches on a number of thought- provoking considerations. Do machines have feelings? Can they be taught to think as humans, and is that a good thing? Is mankind truly the superior species on this planet? Should one be loyal to his own kind or should he act for the greater good, regardless of the consequences?


Peopled with well-rounded characters who interact as real humans do, and a computer program that interacts with them all in unexpected ways, SIRAT moves along at a brisk pace from its well-founded premise to its startling conclusion. The dialogue is crisp, the settings evocative, and the action believable. There is enough computer data contained within the novel's pages to satisfy geeks, yet the language is not so high-tech that it cannot be easily grasped by the computer illiterate. With SIRAT, David Gardiner has produced a work whose implications will resonate in the mind and make readers pause whenever they sit down at the keyboard before a glowing monitor.