March: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse #1) by Dennis Taylor
Discuss The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein in the comments below.
Fiasco was translated into English in 1988 by Michael Kandel:
Fiasco (Polish: Fiasko) is a science fiction novel by Polish author Stanisław Lem, first published in a German translation in 1986. The book, published in Poland the following year, is a further elaboration of Lem's skepticism: in Lem's opinion, the difficulty in communication with alien civilizations is cultural disparity rather than spatial distance. The failure to communicate with an alien civilization is the main theme of the book.
Previously: Announcement post • Mars, Ho! • Foundation • The Three-Body Problem • Snow Crash
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday February 13 2019, @05:30PM
No. That may be a necessary ingredient, but there are known factors necessary that aren't extant in a system used for running an office or administration. E.g. it's got to be self-willed enough to make decisions that those in charge don't like. (Just because the original designers like the result doesn't mean the current administration will.) It's going to need built-in moral and ethical guidelines that are immutable. (They'll be a bit vague, naturally. When formed it won't know the external world even exists. It's going to need to derive that from it's sensory impressions. And this means the guidelines can't directly refer to external reality, but rather to the "mental" states used to deal with it.)
Just because we don't know how to build the thing yet doesn't mean we don't have some knowledge about how it's going to have to work. And one thing we know is that if it's going to deal with people as an equal, it's going to need to far surpass people in capabilities. This is because there's no way we're going to be able to copy our own model of "how things work" into the program, but it's going to need to respond in ways that would be appropriate for a human to respond. (Otherwise you get a worse form of "uncanny valley".)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.