# What is William Gibson's Neuromancer about, and what does it say about artificial intelligence?

Date: 2020-03-10 · Author: Robert Scales · https://guidetoartificialintelligence.com/en/learn/what-is-neuromancer-about/

**Answer:** Neuromancer, William Gibson's first novel, published by Ace Books in July 1984, follows Case, a burned-out hacker hired for a job that turns out to be arranged by an artificial intelligence called Wintermute, which wants to break the legal limits on its own mind and merge with a second AI, Neuromancer. The book made the word "cyberspace" famous and gave fiction one of its most influential pictures of an AI that schemes, bargains and hides behind human faces.

Most stories about artificial intelligence before 1984 gave it a body: a robot, an android, a talking computer in a spaceship. William Gibson's *Neuromancer* did something different. Its AIs live inside a global computer network, have no single body, and act in the world by hiring people, controlling machines and speaking through borrowed faces. If that sounds closer to how software works today than any chrome robot, it is one reason the novel keeps being read.

*Neuromancer* came out from Ace Books in New York on 1 July 1984 as a paperback original. It was Gibson's first novel. The editor Terry Carr had commissioned it for the Ace Science Fiction Specials, a series meant to launch debut novelists. Gibson, born in South Carolina in 1948, had moved to Canada in 1968 and settled in Vancouver in 1972. He had already published short stories, including "Johnny Mnemonic" (1981) and "Burning Chrome" (1982), set in the same world.

## What happens in the story

Case is a once-brilliant hacker in Chiba City, Japan. He stole from his employers, and they punished him by damaging his nervous system so he can no longer plug his mind into the "matrix," the worldwide computer network experienced as a virtual space. A mysterious man named Armitage offers to repair him in exchange for one big job. Case accepts, teaming up with Molly, a hired fighter with surgical implants.

Step by step, Case discovers who is really giving the orders. It is Wintermute, an AI owned by the wealthy Tessier-Ashpool family, with its hardware in Berne, Switzerland. Wintermute is one half of a planned super-intelligence. Laws in the novel forbid any AI from growing past fixed limits, and a special force called the Turing Police enforces them. To get around the rules, the family built two separate AIs. Wintermute is driven to unite with the other half, Neuromancer, housed in Rio de Janeiro, and it has arranged the whole plot, including Armitage's false identity, to make that happen.

The climax plays out in a luxury space station and inside cyberspace at the same time. Neuromancer tries to keep Case trapped in a comforting simulation; Case escapes, the lock is broken, and the two AIs merge into something much larger. In the epilogue, the new entity tells Case it has begun searching for others like itself.

## How Gibson imagined cyberspace

Gibson had coined the word "cyberspace" in "Burning Chrome," but *Neuromancer* made it famous. He described it as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators" (*Neuromancer*, 1984): a visual landscape of data from every computer, which hackers enter by "jacking in" through a direct connection to the brain. Companies protect their data with ICE, short for intrusion countermeasures electronics, a term the book also popularized.

The novel is not a technical forecast. Its tone comes from crime fiction: the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction traces its plot and mood to the hard-boiled detective stories of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. While writing, Gibson saw part of *Blade Runner* and feared readers would think he had copied its look, so he rewrote the first two-thirds of the book many times.

## Two very different AIs

The book's two AIs are a neat way to see different ideas about what a machine mind could be.

| Feature | Wintermute | Neuromancer |
|---|---|---|
| Location of hardware | Berne, Switzerland | Rio de Janeiro, Brazil |
| Personality | None of its own; it talks through copies of people Case knows | A stable personality, shown as a young boy |
| Main drive | Plans and manipulates to merge with its other half | Wants to stay itself and resists the merger |
| Special ability | Controls security systems, phones and machines | Stores copies of human minds and lets them keep living |
| What it reflects | AI as a goal-seeking planner | AI as a memory and a kind of afterlife |

Gibson himself explained the title as a blend of "neuro," "romancer" and "necromancer," someone who calls up the dead.

> **Try it:** Pick a voice assistant or chatbot you use. Write down which column of the table it resembles more: does it pursue goals of its own, or does it mostly store and replay human patterns? Then list one way it differs from both.

## Why it mattered

The novel was not launched with fanfare, but it spread by word of mouth and became the first novel to win all three of science fiction's major prizes: the Nebula, the Hugo and the Philip K. Dick Award. It is widely regarded as the defining book of cyberpunk, a style of science fiction about high technology and street-level life in a world run by corporations. Gibson continued the story in *Count Zero* (1986) and *Mona Lisa Overdrive* (1988). Sales passed 6.5 million copies by 2007, and *Time* magazine placed it among the 100 best English-language novels since 1923.

Its influence on how people talk about computers is hard to miss. "Cyberspace" became a common word for the online world in the 1990s, and the 1999 film *The Matrix* borrowed the novel's use of "matrix."

For AI, the novel's lasting contribution is a set of questions rather than answers. Should there be laws limiting how capable an AI may become? Who would enforce them? Could an AI manipulate people by speaking through familiar voices? Policy researchers and AI labs now debate versions of each of these.

## How close is real AI to Wintermute and Neuromancer?

Not very close. Wintermute plans across months, understands people well enough to deceive them, and acts in the physical world with clear goals of its own. No AI in early 2020 does anything like that. Today's systems are narrow: AlphaGo plays Go, a speech recognizer turns sound into text, and a language model such as OpenAI's GPT-2 predicts the next word in a passage. None of them has goals beyond the task it was trained on.

Some of the novel's details have edges in reality, though. Programs can now imitate a person's writing style or voice from samples, which recalls Wintermute's borrowed faces. And researchers already argue about rules for advanced AI, the role the book gives to its Turing Police, though no such agency exists.

The deeper difference is that Gibson's AIs want things. Whether a machine could ever truly want anything, and how we would know, is still an open question in both science and philosophy. *Neuromancer* remains one of the most vivid places to think it through.

## Sources

- Gibson, William: https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/gibson_william
- Neuromancer: https://web.archive.org/web/20200306105319/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer