Origin by Dan Brown

This is my second Dan Brown book, and this one was similar in some ways to the other one. Same urgency in the story, compressed into 24 hours of peril and chasing and interesting settings. A little redundant in that way. Very predictable characters. Why did I read another one of these?!

Yet...this one had an interesting premise. Set in Barcelona and other parts of Spain, a rich scientist whose goal in life is to eradicate religion, is set on unleashing a new discovery that will discredit all faith in God. He is able to spontaneously generate life form in a test tube from basic elements, proving that life can spring from nothing. That part wasn't particularly intriguing. What WAS intriguing, though, was his prediction about what comes next. This was fascinating.

Our next iteration as humans is that we integrate ourselves with technology and evolve into "singularity" -- that moment when synthetic intelligence trumps human intelligence. It's artificial intelligence on steroids. It turns out that the mastermind behind a complex set of murders and malevolence is a supercomputer known as "Winston." As the story unfolds, his devious plan becomes chilling, because he doesn't view it as wrong. An interesting premise... The very technology that will help us solve complex problems like drinking water and global warming can also make us amoral. It's an interesting twist near the end of the book.

Religious people and "creationists" are thrown into the same unintelligent bag, and that's annoying. There doesn't seem to be room for people of faith to be thinkers... Although one of the main characters, Professor Langdon seems to straddle the faith conundrum artfully in an explanation of the difference between patterns and code. Patterns occur in nature and do not convey meaning. Code, like language conveys meaning. He cites DNA as an example of something organic in nature that ALSO has meaning, and therefore may have an intelligent creator. So...that was an interesting distinction.