The novel *Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution* is a speculative fiction book by P.W. Singer and August Cole that, like their other novel *Ghost Fleet*, grounds many aspects of the story in current or near-future technology and ideas supported by end notes to articles covering the topics covered.
The novel does have high tech-low life aspects with courier drones, A.I., remote/virtual entertainers/caretakers that get bonuses based on how pleased people are with their service, excessive stimulate drug use to continue working, robot labor increasing human unemployment, and other such things. The part that I don’t know if it is cyberpunks is that the main duo is an FBI agent and her partner which is an experimental learning A.I. driven robot. And while the FBI is typically part of “the man” or “system” that punk goes against, the main character is more of a loose cannon cop archetype and there are higher elements of “the system” working against her goals (to be as limited on details as possible).
So with that in mind, does that sound like the book qualities as cyberpunk or just technothriller with some slight dystopian aspects?
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Yeah this is cyberpunk. How strangely specific though. Brookings institute and the Nobel Institute. I remember these guys. A lot of people kind of complained about this. And if it was fair for them to have this kind of help and the biases involved. People tend to view things unfavorably when the control of information is unequally distributed to a small elite group of individuals. The fact that the majority of these roles and positions are given to a small set of individuals who belong to specific schools.
Personally I’ve never read their work but I’ve heard a lot of negative things about the authors.