I just finished reading The Fear Index, a 2011 book by Robert Harris. It is a story about Alex Hoffman, an American mathematical genius who has moved to Geneva, Switzerland, first to work at its CERN Large Hadron Collider and then to settle down, get married...and start his own hedge fund company. The abrupt change in career direction happens due to his invention of a very, very complex computer algorithm that permeates the Internet and infers patterns of investment behavior and factors, automatically acting upon them. The rate of return in his company for his investors is staggeringly high, and his algorithm seems to work the best whenever there is any kind of panic in the market, causing fear reactions. And then Hoffman discovers that someone in his own personal life is trying their hardest to cause him to be afraid for his own self...
The main characters in The Fear Index are Hoffman, his wife Gabrielle, his extroverted business partner Hugo Quarry, and the local police inspector Leclerc...who struck me as a Swiss version of Columbo (he lives across the border in France because it is cheaper there). Hoffman's algorithm, set into action, is self-educating and as a budding Artificial Intelligence is developing two important traits of living things: a sense of personal survival and a tendency to test the meanings of words it learns...the most important one here being "fear". The rest of the story flows from this and the ending perfectly describes the state we're plummeting headlong into with our increasing, devil-may-care dependency on computers and the Internet...
As a friend and former colleague...who recommended this book to me...alluded, there seems to be a tendency nowadays to see a lot of manipulation in the mass media...as well as social media...to frighten the population into adopting certain political stances, as well as making them rush to buy the "necessary" things that will protect them. Fear is a great tool for propaganda as well as advertising, and it is pervasive...as well as running counter to informed, rational reasoning. Folks terrified out of their senses tend to run in whatever direction the mob is going...and this is how those manipulating them can get what they want. It seems like with too many people nowadays, their vision of the future is to avoid their artificially-induced nightmare scenarios instead of looking to create a better world for themselves and the society that they and their descendants will inhabit. I also liked The Fear Index and recommend it...besides the message, the characters in it were well developed and believable while the story was suspenseful...
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