Prey
by Michael Crichton · first published 2002
33% recommend63% neutral4% critical
Why HN recommends it
A techno-thriller about self-replicating nanotech swarms and emergent AI. It offers a plausible sketch of how AGI could arise, with eerie grey-goo tension. Suited to fans of technical speculative sci-fi.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Prey is a novel by Michael Crichton, his thirteenth under his own name and twenty-third overall, first published in November 2002, making his first novel of the twenty-first century. The novel serves as a cautionary tale about developments in science and technology; in this case, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and distributed artificial intelligence. The book features relatively new advances in the computing/scientific community, such as artificial life, emergence (and by extension, complexity), genetic algorithms, and agent-based computing. Fields such as population dynamics and host
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Michael Crichton - Prey https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0061703087/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_UHC...
on “Scientists build army of a million microrobots that fit inside hypodermic needle” ↗Not sure about hard SF, but Prey by Michael Crichton? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(novel)
on “Ask HN: Novels about or featuring malevolent AI?” ↗I should really re-read Prey by Michael Crichton. Loved the grey goo in that one.
on “This layoff does not exist” ↗…science fiction that feature tech concepts heavily in their narratives? It might be futuristic technology, but I think the overall feeling of "techy language" would be similar. Or speculative fiction like Prey by Michael Crichton, or even something like Disclosure by the same, which from what I can remember is set at a hardware company?
on “Ask HN: What technology and adjacent world would work in literary fiction?” ↗Daemon is one of my favorite books. Michael Crichton's Prey with robot swarms is cool too.
on “Daemon (2006)” ↗Prey and Timeline are two of my favorite. Micro (which was finished by another author after Crichton's death) is also very good an dissimilar to Prey. Since I like Timeline so much it made watching the movie…
on “Michael Crichton, Science Studies, and the Technothriller (2015)” ↗Far from an expert here, but your comment makes me think of Michael Crichton's 'Prey', if you've not already read it. Not that I wish to add to your apprehension.
on “AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology” ↗The best description of AGI I've seen is in Michael Crichton's Prey. He describes in a fairly plausible detail how AGI rises from the building blocks. The emotion he captures is that of dealing with a psychopath -- goal oriented with no empathy -- to the infinite degree.…
on “After OpenAI's Blowup, It Seems Pretty Clear That 'AI Safety' Isn't a Real Thing” ↗Prey by Michael Crichton.
on “New research considers 'growing' drones” ↗I remember reading Prey by Michael Crichton as a teenager and wondering if the nanobots he described there could be used to "eat" a tumor, like leaf-cutter ants gradually moving bits of material in a pipeline from one place…
on “Nanorobots That Can Travel Down the Bloodstream and Precisely Target Tumors” ↗Michael Crichton, who wrote and directed the original Westworld (also of Jurassic Park fame), describes the same idea in his novel Prey[0], which is about emergent AI from swarms of self-replicating nano-bots. 0. https://www.amazon.com/Prey-Michael-Crichton/dp/0061703087/r...
on “Predictive Learning [pdf]” ↗Has anyone here read Micro or Prey by Michael Crichton? > In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone horribly wrong. A cloud of nanoparticles—micro-robots—has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing.…
on “Magnetic swarm intelligence of mass-produced, programmable microrobot assemblies” ↗Very interesting - thanks for sharing. I'm not a scientist and the only time I've come across discussion of phages before was in the Michael Crichton novel, Prey.
on “No antibiotics worked, so this woman turned to phage scientists” ↗Oddly enough, I was at this speech. I left with a lot more respect for Crichton as a scientific thinker, and I almost read the book he was publicizing at the time, Prey.
on “Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming” ↗…use it constantly. More impressive, however, is Amazon's ability to find products based on a photo. Interestingly, neither ShopSavvy nor Amazon correctly identify the Michael Crichton trade paperback "Prey" (both substitute a different product), but Amazon immediately found it when I used the 'photo search'. It does very well on book covers, even obscure/less popular ones. For instance, I got my Loeb book…
on “ShopSavvy Comes To The Iphone - Turn your Iphone into a Barcode Reader” ↗