In the Blink of an Eye (SF) - Jo Callaghan *****

For someone who likes both science fiction and contemporary British police procedural novels, this is a gift. It features Detective Chief Superintendent Kat Frank - a senior police officer with even more baggage than is traditional for fictional detectives - being paired up with an AI detective called Lock in a trial to see if AI can aid detection. As it is a trial, they work on something well beneath the pay grade of a real DCS - missing person cold cases.

Jo Callaghan produces an excellent page turner of a mystery novel which would have worked without the science fiction element, but is really brought to the next level by the addition of Lock. Of itself, adding AI to police work is lab lit (i.e. perfectly possible with today's technology), but Lock is something else. In her acknowledgements, Callaghan says 'With the exception of Lock's real-time conversational abilities, many aspects of AI described in the book either exist now or are on the horizon' - this is stretching things in a big way. I'll come back to that later for purists, but it's not at all a problem for the reader unless you don't accept that this is science fiction.

Of course, the concept of putting an AI detective alongside a human partner is nothing new. One thing reading this book has made me realise is that I need to re-read Asimov's 1953 novel The Caves of Steel, which features a (far future) detective Elijah Baley who is teamed up with the robotic detective R. Daneel Olivaw. Just like Baley, in Callaghan's book Frank doesn't trust the AI and doesn't want to work with it - but in both cases they come to grudging mutual respect. Another parallel, which I think Callaghan could have made more of, is Data in Star Trek TNG. What makes Data so entertaining is the opportunity for humour in misunderstanding between the AI and the humans. Callaghan has a sequel on the way - I hope she can make a bit more of this aspect, which only comes out right at the end of the current book.

The big difference between the predecessors and Lock is that Lock is not a robot. He is pure software, but is able to project a totally lifelike 3D image, both of 'himself' (in various avatars) and of people who feature in the case, 3D data presentations and more. This allows for more of the kind of interactions that happen with the robots in the two predecessors mentioned than would have been the case if Lock had been a totally disembodied program.

This feature also takes us into the reason why, in reality, Lock is way beyond current technology. The idea of being able to project lifelike 3D images into thin air (especially from a bracelet, as is the case here) is not conceivable with any current technology. Early on, Callaghan has her irritating young AI professor gets things distinctly wrong in explaining the broad capability AGI (artificial general intelligence) that Lock has, effectively saying all you need to go from narrow AI to AGI is deep learning - which is actually what you need for good narrow AI such as large language models. It doesn't enable the human-like AGI we see here. So a degree of SF is required to make this feasible too.

 What the book does do, secondarily to the enjoyability as a straight SF story, is make you think about the opportunities for AI in policing - for example in checking many hours of CCTV or social media posts. This kind of thing is where Lock does very convincingly help the human team. The only proviso here is that, again, it's still in the realms of science fiction to think that the mobile data speeds portrayed - and the processing power at the server end - would be anything like practical in the near future. It's possible to imagine an AI like Lock that could watch a movie in seconds, or trawl through terabytes of data at high speed - but real world servers aren't going to pump out data fast enough, and even 5G would be way too slow to enable Lock to function (you certainly couldn't cram his capabilities into a bracelet) - not to mention that at the moment I'm lucky to get 4G in many locations.

Overall, there's a good balance here between the SF and mystery aspects (though there is a very predictable plot twist near the end). I enjoyed the book and the 5 stars is well-earned, despite the attempt to pretend it isn't science fiction. I'm looking forward to the sequel, particularly if we can see more of the potential for entertaining interplay between Frank and Lock. Good stuff.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here