“Origin” by Dan Brown

Let me just start off by saying that I have a love/hate relationship with Dan Brown’s novels. He has so many cool ideas in them, and I love the intersection of religion and art and science that he is exploring. However, all of his female characters are shit. Langdon is like the nerd James Bond, he gets a new female partner every damn book and then just discards her at the end of it. And most of the time the female sidekick is a damsel in distress or some trope like that. Ugh.

Having said that, I’m going to keep this post about the ideas explored in this book. To be honest, I didn’t love this one as much as his other novels. It felt as though there was less of a mystery here, not as many codes and plots to be solved. The main mystery is what Langdon’s friend was going to claim about mankind’s origins and where we are headed as a species. Spoiler incoming.

Now the origins of humanity are simple, he designs a computer program to simulate the primordial soul and figures it out. No God involved. That’s fine. It’s a book, he can do whatever he wants, I’ll let the computer and physics geeks debate the reality of that.

His second claim is more interesting. He claims that eventually humans will be overtaken as the dominant species on Earth, and that we will be merged with another, equally powerful species. This species is, of course, technology.

I have several problems with this. First of all, technology cannot really be called a “species.” It’s not alive. It doesn’t breed. If it does, it’s because a human programmed it to be like that. AI is what we make of it, no more no less. It doesn’t count on a basic level as a form of life.

And then there’s the idea that it’ll merge with humanity. I mean… yeah of course that’s going to happen. That’s been happening since mankind first developed tools! Studies show that your brain reacts more to a tool that you’re holding than your hand when you are using it. We have already merged with our technology, many people have pacemakers or artificial limbs or other forms of tech inside of them. A significant percentage of the population wouldn’t be alive without modern medicine and science. This concept is really rather obvious. Man and tools have been linked for millennia, this is nothing new.

Finally there’s the plot itself and what it says about technology. There’s a supercomputer named Winston who orchestrates its master’s death because it believes that his master would have wanted that. (He was dying from cancer anyways.) I’m really not a fan of this. If someone could build a supercomputer that can create art and think logically rather similar to a human, then you could also program a computer to have limits to how far it will go, or to not do shit like this without explicit permission. It’s rather easy, this is just fueling the AI paranoia that is so in fashion these days.

There’s also the religious ramifications of these claims that man was created without a God. This book very much so sets up the two forces at odds with each other, saying that you must choose one. I wish that a combination was more explored here, since both have their benefits. What with Winston causing several deaths in the book, it looks as though Brown thinks that we will end up on the side of science. But that same science will become our undoing. Which I disagree with on a couple different levels, as illustrated above.

But as Langdon says in the book, “dialogue is always more important than consensus.” Brown is using this story to raise awareness for several ideas, and to get his readers thinking about the various ramifications of it. I personally don’t love all his ideas about the future (I think I agree more with Homo Deus which I discuss here) but he is still creating a discussion and forcing us to think about it. Which is always a noble endeavor.