Prey

Michael Crichton uses Prey—and many of his other novels—to examine the notion of progress. Specifically, he creates characters with varying approaches to progress and puts them in situations that push the reader to consider what progress even is and whether or not it can be a bad thing. Silicon Valley lives and dies by the idea that all progress is good and that innovation for its own sake is a net positive. The cutting edge of technology is ever-changing and razor thin. Jack understands this, which is why he is frustrated by the reactionary nature of many common-sense technologies, such as the stoplight he observes at the intersection: “If they were all concerned, why didn’t they do something about it? But of course, that’s human nature. Nobody does anything until it’s too late. We put the stoplight at the intersection after the kid is killed” (47).

The type of innovation pursued by Ricky, Julia, and the military is not driven by common sense, and it is their approach to containing its problems that is reactionary. The technology is aggressively pursued on behalf of greater power and profits. It is a critical point that the military is behind much of the innovation that drives the experiments in Prey. Xymos was working to militarize the swarms on behalf of greater surveillance opportunities that would then lead to more lethal, targeted attacks. Julia’s early demo of the swarm’s medical potential is a wonderful example of how technology can improve or even save lives. But in this case, the intent is power and domination.

However, they refused to plan for the possibility of emergent behavior in the swarm, even though, in Jack’s opinion, they knew enough to understand it was plausible, if not inevitable. In fact, he reveals that “[p]sychologists now believed a certain amount of random behavior was necessary for innovation. You couldn’t be creative without striking out in new directions, and those directions were likely to be random” (212). Randomness is, by definition, unpredictable, and the randomness of the results at the Nevada lab condemn the haste of their creation.

Jack is the best example of positive, thoughtful innovation. Rather than relentlessly chasing success, he pursues his career because it is financially enriching, intellectually satisfying, and potentially beneficial to humanity. His eye is always on the future, which dictates his research and behavior in the present. As soon as he encounters reckless innovation, like the Xymos swarms, he is outraged and incredulous. For Jack, innovation that proceeds too quickly—particularly when dealing with unpredictable systems like artificial intelligence or genetic engineering—is unethical, even when it may not appear dangerous at the time. When he describes the typical pattern of agent-based behavior, he says, “It took a long time for agents to ‘lay the groundwork,’ and to accomplish the early stuff, but once that was completed, subsequent progress could be swift” (182).

Humans create the agents, but they cannot control the rate at which they evolve; as he notes, contemplating the likelihood of the swarm reproducing, “[w]hatever evolutionary mechanism was built into the code was progressing fast, too” (206). He recognizes the inherent danger in creating machines that can teach themselves—leading to forming their own goals and defending their existence, which inevitably pits them against their threatened creators. He never underestimates the speed or unpredictability of progress, understanding that it can move further and faster than its creators could have imagined.