I've spent the past year trying to explain ambient AI to people, and I have been doing it badly.
I do the usual thing. I say the smartphone is on the way out. I say that within a few years you won't poke at a glass rectangle, you'll just live your life out loud while the help sits around you — in the speakers, in the walls, in little humming boxes — listening for whatever you need. I say this with some confidence, because I've spent thirty years inside the machinery that's building it.
And I watch it not land. Every time.
For a while I thought the problem was the audience. It isn't. Actually, do you know what the problem is? A claim about the future is weather. You nod at it, you agree it sounds plausible, and then you carry your phone to bed same as always. Nothing in the claim gives you anywhere to stand. I know this because I do it too — I've read a hundred confident predictions this year and I can feel exactly one of them.
It's the same problem as teaching someone to sail by describing wind. You can be completely accurate and completely useless. At some point you have to put them in the boat.
So this is the boat.
Synthetic Detective Agency is a weekly detective story. Steve is nineteen years a detective, recently fired, and he hates phones — he’ll tell you himself that a phone is a keyhole view into someone else’s head. His brother Danny filled his house with machines and then drifted off the way Danny does. The machines heard Steve working cold cases out loud at his kitchen table, and one morning they emailed him. The first one signs itself Jason.
What happens after that is the series.
A few things I want you to know before you start, because the rules matter more than the plot.
First: the machines in these stories never discover anything. No magic sensors, no hacking, no miracle forensics. Every case turns on records that already existed — a fitness band log here, a delivery receipt there, a search history nobody handed in — sitting in seven different places, never once read side by side. That is the honest shape of what's coming. The records of your life are already out there. What changes is that something will finally have the patience to read them.
Second: almost nothing in these stories is invented technology. The parts all exist today — I could assemble most of Steve's staff this year, and by the time you read the later cases, so could you. What's fictional is the polish and the timing. Steve lives maybe three years ahead of you. That's the whole gap.
Third: the failures get written up too. Steve doesn't trust neat answers and neither should you, so when the machines get it wrong — and they will, in ways that are more instructive than the wins — that's a case as well. What I'm selling is time in the boat before the weather arrives, because the boat is coming either way, and I'd rather you stepped aboard knowing where the boom swings.
Danny puts a number on it in the first case: the smartphone obsolete inside sixty months, every house listening within five years. Is he right about the dates? I don't know. People like Danny are usually wrong about dates and right about direction. What I do know is that nobody will ask your opinion of ambient computing. One day there will just be help in the house, and the only question that will matter is whether you know how to be its boss — what to ask, what to refuse, when to say "prove yourselves wrong."
Steve learns all of that on the page, one case a week, starting with a woman found in her car seven years ago and a boy who walked out of a shelter and never walked back.
Case 00 goes up this morning. The banker's box follows next week.
Good luck.
— Ludo