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    Burn-In
    Burn-In
    Burn-In
    Audiobook14 hours

    Burn-In

    Written by P. W. Singer and August Cole

    Narrated by Mia Barron

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    An FBI agent hunts a new kind of terrorist through a Washington, DC, of the
    future in this groundbreaking book—at once a gripping techno-thriller and a fact-based tour of tomorrow.

    America is on the brink of a revolution, one both technological and political.
    The science fiction of AI and robotics has finally come true, but millions are angry
    and fearful that the future has left them behind. After narrowly stopping a bombing
    at Washington’s Union Station, FBI Special Agent Lara Keegan receives a new
    assignment: to field-test an advanced police robot. As a series of shocking catastrophes
    unfolds, the two find themselves investigating a conspiracy whose mastermind is using
    cutting-edge tech to rip the nation apart. To stop this new breed of terrorist, their only
    hope is to forge a new type of partnership.

    Burn-In is especially chilling because it is something more than a pulse-pounding
    read: every tech, trend, and scene is drawn from real-world research on the ways that
    our politics, our economy, and even our family lives will soon be transformed. Blending
    a techno-thriller’s excitement with nonfiction’s insight, Singer and Cole illuminate the
    darkest corners of the world soon to come.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 26, 2020
    ISBN9781501949579
    Author

    P. W. Singer

    P. W. SINGER is an expert on twenty-first-century warfare. His award-winning nonfiction books include the New York Times bestseller Wired for War.

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    Reviews for Burn-In

    4/5

    72 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Well-paced. Good techo-thriller. Some key plot elements were telegraphed, though. Better than than "out of left field", I guess.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Excellent. Near future chiming with the present day. Recommended reading.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      Thank God 'Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution' came to a rapid ending with no dragged out denouement. However, they did leave it open for 'The Continued Adventures of FBI Agent Keegan and TAMS.' If you imagine "insect protein" bars are in our future, and that the only reason hunters use silencers is so they can silently murder people, and that huge numbers of White Supremacists are trying to take over the USA and equipping their kids with AR15s to shoot LEOs, and that our sainted homeless camps are full of just recently unemployed folks, who are so very law abiding they elect a mayor, a woman, no less, you'll love this book. I am so glad that I utilized the B&N Café & Lending Library to read this Left Wing stinker rather than spending 28 bucks on it.
    • 3/5
      In the America of ten or twenty years in the future, a large portion of the populace is under or unemployed due to increased automation.The country still has a terrorist problem and not just with the Sons of Aleppo but with another movement that is determined to throw sand into the workings of society. They resent the automation software and hardware that society has become dependent on.Special Agent Keegan of the FBI arrests a member of that plot and, in the interrogation, TAMS is introduced. It’s a Tactical Autonomous Mobility System robot. Its humanoid frame has impressive physical abilities, but its real benefit is its ability to access and correlate a lot of disparate information.Political pressure has been brought to bear to test TAMS robots out for law enforcement, and Keegan gets ambiguous instructions from the FBI’s Deputy Director to do the right thing by the Bureau. Is that to ok the program or kill it with a bad report? There’s also a creepy tech billionaire, Shaw, who takes an interest in the project and who is very connected to the White House.The first half of the novel is largely Keegan putting TAMs through its paces to see if it can be a real partner in investigations. The second half is the investigation and pursuit of a wide-ranging terrorist plot to discredit automation through various ingenious and lethal events. One plot twist was entirely predictable, but the authors pulled out a genuine surprise towards the end.The leader of the terrorist plot is an interesting character whose actions can’t automatically be morally dismissed. A personal tragedy has turned him into being a bitter enemy of the technology he used to promote. However, his target selection has a cliched serial-killer element about it.The authors describe their book as “useful fiction” rather than science fiction. A lot of the hardware and software describe in this book already exists or is in prototype. The rest is plausible. The authors document everything with footnotes in ghostly type so as not to distract the reader. I knew the book had footnotes but didn’t notice them until number five. Sometimes they are overkill like footnoting Disney song lyrics.The details of the world already here or aborning are the book’s best part. Among other things, we see all the many counter-surveillance options citizens in this world employ, a robot sex club where the destruction of robots is a fetish, and how wealthy neighborhoods keep automated traffic control systems from funneling cars through their neighborhood. Keegan’s husband is Yale lawyer whose job was rendered surplus to requirements, and he now picks up money checking up and chatting with, via remote virtual reality gear, wealthy clients in nursing homes.The value of this book is not in the plot’s resolution or the political solution reached at the end. It’s in the questions asked.And that solution is not convincing.Interestingly, I couldn’t decide whether the authors were being deeply ironical in their depiction of the FBI and Shaw or exhibit the naivete of Washington DC insiders trapped in a cultural bubble and whom simply accept the cultural values of the elite. But, given the last page and a couple of incidental bones thrown to progressive causes in the book, I opted for the naivete. And that brought my rating down from four to three stars.Still, it’s a quick read, genuinely suspenseful at the end, and gives one plenty to contemplate.