Robots Will Dream Of Electric Sheep

27 November  2019 (Wall Street International)*  — The second science fiction novel I read in my life (just after Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, to whom I almost copied the title of this text) Ender’s Game was a book that impressed me hardly; firstly because the author uses as protagonists 7 year old children to save the Earth from a space threat known as the Buggers.

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These child heroes are described as cold and fearsome statesmen and military strategists, trained to the limit in the art of war and at their young age, they are experts in many advanced disciplines such as astrophysics, mathematics and computer science.

Of all these geniuses, of course, highlights Ender Wiggin, the leader of the clan and in charge of commanding the extermination of the Buggers when the time for the final battle comes.

The book (which is a saga) contains several extremely interesting characters and situations that lead us to think about possible scenarios that humanity might face in the future, like space traveling and contacting alien beings.

Second, there was a character from this saga that caught my attention powerfully since it was introduced in the story, and it is the reason and main point of this text that I am writing to you now.

Her name is Jane and she is introduced for the first time in the second book of the saga, called Speaker for the Dead, as an inseparable companion of Ender, the protagonist. Jane is an advanced computational entity that exists in a sort of Internet, known in the book as the “ansible network”; she is an extremely prevailing and complex program; it is capable of performing trillions of tasks simultaneously and has millions of levels of perception, recruitment and location; she can provide information of any kind in the universe instantaneously, and communicates with Ender through a small pearl added to his ear, although she is also able to present herself in a holographic manner and then adopts the form of a woman with a youthful face.

She only reveals herself to Ender and cannot do so to mankind, because she knows that she represents the greatest threat that creation of such an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) can give us, because her intelligence is far superior of many planets combined, and she can’t be controlled or defeated.

While this is a science fiction book, this character from Orson Scott Card offers us a little look at what the future, in no more than 10 years, may hold.