The Sword and Laser discussion

The comparison of ATHENA to the Matrix's Oracle I think was a pretty easy one to make. In both stories you have an illusion of free will based on the framing of your particular situation at any given time done to nudge you into a particular direction. The framing of the situations are done subtlety enough as to not appear to be influenced by a outside source.

Even though ATHENA's ability to manipulate the environment is a bit less than that of say the Architect's ability within the Matrix to affect everything within that virtual world, ATHENA none-the-less is darn good at seeing probability and setting the stage for a (at least ATHENA desired) result.

The idea of controlling crime in this manner creeps me out mostly because I don't like the idea of being manipulated by a human much less a computer even to catch a criminal.

Also, is ATHENA directly responsible for the deaths since it merely set the environment up in a manner that would give a high probability of a mortal injury occurring? Its sort of like the question of does giving a gun to a psycho makes you responsible at all for what he does with it.

As a side note to the story, the purpose of the ATHENA program reminds me in a way of the robots in The Evitable Conflick in Asimov's I, Robot attempting to protect human's from themselves.

I thought the emergent AI was one of the best parts of the story. I do think the way ATHENA does things makes it more sinister because it is so out of sight it's almost like a "super power". I have always wondered though what if a person or a small group of people realize what is going on and just take steps to keep the AI from seeing them through electronic fuzzing or careful destruction of the survelliance devices the AI uses what then happens? Is it the begininng of war ala Skynet or does some humans become ghosts in the machine?