Mind War; The Singularity

You can't control something that is smarter than you are, but that is exactly what a band of renegade scientists are trying to do after the United States has been conquered in a devastating Chinese invasion.  They are building a supercomputer in their own image, modeled on the human brain, but capable of growing in power at an exponential rate.  Will it do what they want it to do?  Ignore them?  Kill the entire human race?  There is no way of knowing until it happens.  But when you're desperate, you take desperate chances.

America is gone now, the country occupied by millions of Chinese soldiers and administrators who hold it in an iron grip.  Working in a secret underground lab, former American defense department researchers hope to create superweapons that they can use to start a revolt and overcome the Chinese military advantage.  The center of their efforts is a supercomputer that will be able to invent new technologies beyond anyone's imagination.  But a computer with true creativity is one that you cannot control, and no one has a good answer to that problem. Once it reaches the singularity -- the point where it exceeds human intelligence -- it will be able to overcome any restraints that humans can design.  Their only plan is to rely on faith that their child will not kill its parents.

This is a story of the near future, the next step in evolution.  With Moore's Law reliably predicting that computing power will double every eighteen months, it is only a matter of time, and not much at that, before computers will surpass us.  Will we be able to share the planet with artificial intelligence, or will it replace us?  Most likely, it will do something completely unanticipated.   Every explorer knows that when you venture into the unknown, you find something that you didn't know was there.