Short review:
It's an insult to it's source, read the original novel instead.
Long review, contains spoilers:
The two faces of tomorrow is a nice novel about what would happen in a smart society where humans are smart enough to realize an AI could potentially turn against them.
It is an interesting take on the 'AI revolution' idea, because in this scenario, scientists are in charge so they decide to test what would happen if the AI really did turn against humanity.
The original novel is a very interesting story with very human characters.
The manga adaptation is a disgrace to the original novel, and I will point-out some of the reasons in this review by citing passages form the novel:
Having read the novel, this manga makes me very angry.
I have only one thing to say about this 'adaptation'.
This scene:
Is supposed to equate this scene:
(In the book, Dyer is showing Laura how FISE learns, FISE is a neural network)
The image was a miniature representation of a one-story house, looking to all intents and purposes like a real, solid children's doll house, complete with fittings and furnishings. When Laura approached it again and studied it more carefully, however, she realized that all the objects represented were gross oversimplifications of the things they were supposed to be, rather than accurate models. It suggested the kind of surroundings that might have been created for a three-dimensional children's cartoon.
Laura looked at Dyer inquiringly.
"That's fise," Dyer explained, pointing at one of the cubicles nearby. "The image in the tank is fise's world. We've given him a very simple world so that he can get his basic concepts straight without having to worry about lots of complications that exist in the real one."
"How do you know it's a him?" Laura challenged absently as she continued to study the image. Dyer raised his eyes momentarily toward the ceiling in a silent plea farpatience.
"It's a him because we made it a him," Ron declared flatly. His glare dared her to dispute the rationale behind that. Dyer breathed silent relief when Laura merely sniffed, evidently electing not to take the point further.
I'm so angry :)
"And then Laura looked at Titan and said 'Titan should be a girl cause girls are smart :)))))' "
"And then dyer looked at Titan and said 'he, she who cares!!' as he raised his hands like a teenager japanese cartoon character 'It's the closest thing to a '''real AI''' ;@@"
Please remember this is an adaptation...It's not even an original work, you are adapting a book into a manga...
It's not a movie, you have all the time in the world to show-off your character's personalities...
Titan is not called an 'AI' by dyer, Titan is called a 'hesper machine', because Dyer is a scientist and he has been working with Titan and FISE for a long, long time. There is a very impotant distinction between Hesper, FISE and 'Real AI'; FISE is training to eventually become a 'Real AI', Titan is an old model that could never become a real AI, when it comes to intelligence it is a complex as a calculator.
Here is the big difference, textually, from the book:
FISE:
"Functional Integration using Simulated Environment," Dyer said.
"Oh. I see. That sounds impressive."
"But Chris has got his own version."
"Really? What does Chris call it?" Laura asked.
Dyer grinned. "Fastest Idiot Seen on Earth," he told her.
Hesper machine
Laura looked up at him. "If fise is a learning computer, what's a hesper computer?" she asked. "I thought hesper was supposed to be some kind of learning computer too."
"It is," he replied simply, "Or more precisely, it's a programming technique. It stands for HEuristic Self-Programming Extendable Routine—a set of interrelated programs that form a structure that can learn as it goes."
"I'm not sure I see the difference."
"It's a question of degree," he said. "hesper systems are specialized to handle one particular kind of application. You could set up a hesper system that will optimize itself over a period of time, say . . . play a game of chess. The more games it plays, the better it gets until you can't keep up with it. But that's all it's good for. But something like fise would possess a broad base of general concepts. It could learn to handle anything. So all you'd have to do is develop it once and get it right instead of having to set up thousands of different hesper systems all the time. It would supersede hesper programming in the same kind of way that hesper is taking over from the classical distributed parallel programming that's been around since . . . aw, the 1980s, 1990s."
Dyer saying that 'Titan is the closest thing to a real AI' shows me that the author of this manga does not understand the importance of characterization, Dyer would never have said something as dumb as that, because Dyer is an arrogant self-interested, know-it-all prick!
I think this scene best describes what I am going at here, in this scene, it's friday night and Dyer is home. Sharon (Dyer's girlfriend, or wife, it's not clear):
"I really can't understand why you'd rather stay in," she exuberated over her shoulder. "On an evening like this? . . . And it's Friday. The whole city's out there waiting to be lit up. Why d'you want to stay here?"
"Aw, I've seen enough of the goddam city." Dyer stretched himself back luxuriously and sipped his drink. "Why don't we relax for once. How about a really nice meal, cooked in for once, open a few bottles, turn on some nice music . . ."
"Then what?" Sharon asked suspiciously.
"Then nothing. Just enjoy it." He downed half of his beer in a long smooth gulp and wiped his moustache with the side of his finger. "We could have a philosophic discussion about cabbages, kings and the meaning of the universe."
(...) Some more back and-forth leads to this scene, here Sharon insists to take dyer out to town:
"Philosophy's out, so is tribal anthropology," he said. "How about a compromise? I'll take you out to dinner."
Sharon pouted. "But I'm not in the mood for a quiet cozy evening for two," she insisted. "I need some fun," she said. "How about a compromise? I'll take you out to the party." As she spoke her voice rose and fell with an exaggerated slur, as if she were already delirious, but beneath it her tone was an ultimatum. If he didn't agree to enjoying a lousy evening he'd end up having a lousy evening instead.
Dammit! He wasn't going along with it. The tightening of his mouth telegraphed his mood across the room.
"Uh, uh," Sharon said. "I can feel black clouds looming somewhere around here."
Her gaiety evaporated while she waited a few seconds for a response. She sipped her drink and stared expectantly over her glass at Dyer's sprawled and seemingly unhearing form.
"Anyhow," she went on, "let's put it this way. I'm going. You can decide whatever you want."
No visible reaction.
"Well, don't just lie there swigging booze like Julius Caesar or somebody. Say something. Are you coming or not?"
"This organization does not negotiate to terrorist demands," Dyer informed her, keeping his eyes fixed on the ceiling.
"What are you talking about? Who's terrorizing anybody? I just said what I'm doing, that's all."
"Blackmail then," Dyer told her with a sigh.
"I don't understand," she answered. Even as she said it, the insinuation that she was being slow on the uptake about something irked her further.
She countered instinctively. "Well, if that means you're opting out, that's okay by me. Bill and Lee will be there for sure. They're always good fun to have around."
"Screw all of you! I've had it!" Before he realized what he was doing, Dyer jumped up off the couch and stormed through into the kitchen. He tore the top off another beer, refilled his glass, and swallowed enough to empty the can, which he hurled into the waste-disposal hatch. Implied blackmail, probably unwitting, was one thing; overt threats was another. Why did people who had to have everything spelled out in three-letter words infuriate him so much? The damn woman was about as perceptive as a stampeding rhino.
Look at this asshole, just look at him!
You can feel his assholeness leak through the pages, and it's so fucking human at that, you really think this egghead that calls a party 'tribal anthropology' would call a hesper machine 'real AI' ?
And we're only at page 15 on the manga!!
I will not be able to post a review of this as an adaptation because if I view it as such, this is not even a joke, it's an insult to the original work!
By the way the manga starts with a shot from some sort of machine breaking rocks, and then a shot from the lunar landscape.
Do you know how the book starts? I think it is very important to read this, in order to get a sense of how wrong this adaptation understood this book:
The planetismal began as a region of above-average density that occurred by chance in a swirling cloud of dust and gas condensing out of the expanding vastness of space.
Gently at first but at a rate that grew steadily faster as time went by, it continued to sweep up the smaller accretions in its vicinity until it had grown to a rough spheroid of compressed dust and rock measuring fifty feet across.
Eventually the planetismal itself came under the pull of a larger body that had been growing in similar fashion, and began falling toward it. It impacted at a speed of over ten miles per second, releasing the energy equivalent of a one-hundred-kiloton bomb and blasting a crater more than half a mile in diameter.
Shortly afterward, as measured on a cosmic time-scale, a second planetismal fell close by and created another crater of similar dimensions; the distance between the crater centers was such that the raised rims of debris thrown up by the explosions merged together for a distance, resulting in the formation of a ridge of exaggerated height between the two basins.
In the time that followed, the rain of meteorites continued, pulverizing the landscape into a wilderness of sharp-grained dust to a depth of several feet, the desolation being relieved only by the occasional outcrop or shattered boulder. The outlines of the craters were slowly eroded away and stirred back into the sea of dust.
When the bombardment at last petered away, all that remained of the ridge was a rounded hummock to mark where the rims had intersected—a mound of dust and rock debris forty feet high and several hundred long. There it remained as one of the weary but triumphant survivors that were left to stare out over the gently rolling wastes that stretched to the horizon.
From then on the ridge remained essentially unchanged. A steady drizzle of
micrometeorites continued to erode the top millimeter or so of its surface, exposing fresh material to trap hydrogen and helium nuclei from the solar wind; particles from sporadic solar flares caused isolated nuclear transformations down to several centimeters, and cosmic rays penetrated slightly farther. But in terms of its size, shape and general appearance, the ridge had become a permanent feature on a changeless world.
Four billion years later, give or take a few, Commander Jerry Fields, assigned to the International Space Administration's lunar base at Reinhold, was standing staring up at that same ridge. Beside him, similarly clad in a blue-gray spacesuit bearing the golden-flashed ISA shoulder
Insignia, Kal Paskoe frowned through his visor, studying the line of the ridge with an engineer's practiced eye.
(...)
(...)The ridge was not really large—about the size of a dozen average houses set end to end—but . . . it was in the way.
And so it came about that the form that had stood valiantly to preserve its record of events from the earliest epoch of the Solar System at last found itself opposing the restless, thrusting outward urge of Man.
The ridge would have to go.
I don't know what to say, I'm surprised the author of the manga could fuck up this bad.
I'll read the rest of the manga and update this with my last thoughts when I finish. Maybe despite being a lobotomized experience, this could still be somehow enjoyable.
Chapter 3:
Gee I wonder why Laura is obsessing over Dyer here instead of the back-and-forth in the book. I wonder why all the important scenes with female characters got condensed into 'wemen :)'. I wonder why all of Dyer's machism and assholery got scrubbed-off the manga...Sigh...
In the book Laura was pretending to be a dumb to make Dyer angry and to better investigate (she is a journalist)... Over here, Laura just feels like a mindless thing...
The fact that Kim is some sort of doll just bothers me on a personal-level, I always imagined her as a short, chubby woman with her hair tyed in a bun and black glasses that more or less cover her eyebags, but well, that's just my personal interpretation.
Regardless, in the manga she is so smug in this scene where she is supposed to be incredibly scared,disturbed and tired because in the past machines killed her husband, and now she is in a giant fucking machine that wants to kill her and all of humanity... But of course, no, she is not feeling any of that, she is angry at Dyer (b-baka) for taking Laura to the station...Of course...Yeah...That's how you write females, sure...
What the fuck are you doing Mr.Hoshino?
All the female characters have been lobotomized, and the male characters have been turned into japanese stereotypes...
I give up, this is saddening to read.
I had hoped that, since this is an adaptation of an already good work, the author would not screw up that bad.
I was wrong, I was so, so wrong...