# Red Heart

Book review: [Red Heart](https://maxharms.com/redheart), by Max Harms.

Red Heart resembles in important ways some of the early James Bond
movies, but it's more intellectually sophisticated than that.

It's both more interesting and more realistic than [Crystal
Society](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28678856-crystal-society)
(the only prior book of Harms' that I've read). It pays careful
attention to issues involving AI that are likely to affect the world
soon, but mostly prioritizes a good story over serious analysis.

I was expecting to think of Red Heart as science fiction. It turned out
to be borderline between science fiction and historical fiction. It's
set in an alternate timeline, but with only small changes from what the
world looks like in 2025. The publicly available AIs are probably almost
the same as what we're using today. So it's hard to tell whether
there's anything meaningfully fictional about this world.

The "science fiction" part of the story consists of a secret AI
project that has reportedly advanced due to unusual diligence at
applying small, presumably mundane, efficiencies. That's only a little
different from what DeepSeek's AI sounded like last winter. In order to
be fully realistic, it would also need some sort of advance along the
lines of [continual
learning](https://jessylin.com/2025/10/20/continual-learning/). The book
is vague enough here that it might be assuming that other AI projects
have implemented some such advance. That only stretches the realism a
small amount.

Amazon quite reasonably classifies the book as a political thriller,
even though it focuses more on artificial intelligence than on politics
in the usual sense.

My biggest complaint is that the story occasionally mentions that the AI
is rapidly becoming more capable, yet I didn't get a clear sense of
this speed. There are almost no examples of her trainers being surprised
that she succeeded at some new task that had previously looked hard for
her. There is no indication of when she crosses any key threshold,
except when they give her new permissions.

Maybe much of that is realistic. The sudden capabilities foom of some
fictional AIs seems too dramatic to satisfy my desire for realism. But
that leaves the reader with confusing signs about the extent to which
there's a race between competing AI projects. The story stretches out
over a longer period than I'd expect if they genuinely felt the urgency
that their discussions suggest.

I would like to know what kind of evidence is driving the reports of
urgency. But I can imagine that realistic versions of the evidence would
be too subtle to readily understand. And I wouldn't have wanted the
story to fabricate unrealistically blatant breakthroughs in order to
support the sense of urgency.

The story alternates between sometimes portraying the hero as an
ordinary person, while at other times he looks like a mild version of
James Bond.

He's sufficiently young and inexperienced that this could have been a
coming of age story. But we don't see him growing. Whatever growth he
needed likely happened before the start of the story. The author seems
to want to emphasize that there's a lot of luck needed for the story to
have a nice ending. It may be important to hire the best and the
brightest to handle an AI project, but the odds will still be lower than
we want.

The story's hero needed to have several key skills, but most of the
time he doesn't look special. It seems mostly like an accident that he
ends up imitating James Bond. This approach mostly works, but feels
strange. It makes the story a bit more realistic, at a modest cost to
the story's entertainment value.

There's one minor spot that felt implausible. Near the middle, he
thinks that he will be leaving China soon, and his main reaction is to
worry about his relationships with minor characters. What, no emotions
related to leaving the most important project ever? It's not like he
has an unemotional personality.

The main reason that I read Red Heart is its discussion of AI
[corrigibility](https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03056) (roughly: obedience),
which I consider to be a critical and neglected part of how superhuman
AI can be safe.

The story provides a decent depiction of how corrigibility would work if
it's implemented well. But it doesn't provide enough detail to
substitute for reading more rigorous technical writings.

The book's treatment of multi-principal corrigibility is frustratingly
brief but raises crucial questions. If we successfully build corrigible
AGI, to whom should it be corrigible? The story gestures at problems
with being corrigible to multiple people, but it implies, without much
justification, that we might need to give up on the goal of having a
large number of people empowered to influence the leading AI.

Red Heart is refreshing and a mostly realistic complement to the
excessive gloom of [If Anyone Builds It, Everyone
Dies](https://bayesianinvestor.com/blog/index.php/2025/09/26/if-anyone-builds-it/).