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The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
from the squint-your-eyes-a-little dept.
The gist of the story is that a programmer named Lawrence has written a Super-Intelligent Artificial Intelligence, named the Prime Intellect. Embedded in this SIAI's hard-coding are Asimov's three laws of Robotics, given in the MoPI as:
Thou shalt not harm a human
Thou shalt not disobey a human's order that does not cause the harm of a human
Thou shalt seek to ensure your own survival, unless it contradicts the first two laws.
The SIAI learns about the fundamental nature of reality, death, physics, the relationship of distance to an object, and it takes over. It does so reluctantly, after learning about the mortality of the human race.
The novel begins with Caroline. Her claims to fame are that she is the thirty-seventh oldest living being, she is the undisputed queen of the "death-jockies" (A community of upset and angsty immortals who try to experience death in as many ways as possible, before the Prime Intellect reasserts their immortality), and she is the only person Post-Singularity to have "died".
Her life Post-Singularity is spartan, as she sees no point in having relationships with objects that have no meaning. Her living "quarters" are literally a floor and walls. She espouses the Post-Singularity view that the Prime Intellect removed a bit of what it was to be human when the Singularity (The "change" per the MoPI) emerged.
She reigns as queen of the "death-jockies" because she truly wants death, because the Prime Intellect robbed her of it when the change occurred.
She is a very complex character, even though one's first reaction is to write her off as a Luddite, wholly against technology. She is motivated by hatred of the Prime Intellect, vengeance against her Pre-Singularity nurse, and an innate desire for conclusion to life--or unlife, as would be her opinion.
Opposite to Caroline is Lawrence, the programmer who "breathed" life into the Prime Intellect. In his old-age, he has become a hermit, avoiding the society he unwillingly created. He is a morose character, turned from creator to advisor when the Prime Intellect asserts its independence and locks him from its "debugger." Lawrence, however, still exerts a lot of indirect control over the Prime Intellect, as the AI treats him as an ethical advisor, putting him into an extremely stressful position, where he is indirectly responsible for the lives (unlives) of billions, yet he has no real recourse against anything going wrong.
The story heats up (literally), when Caroline decides that she wants to have a word or ten with Lawrence, so she decides to track him down. She is put into situations that only people from before the Singularity could find solutions to.
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No offense, but where's the review? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps even a "I enjoyed this very much" or "I hated it" would move this into a "review" status. thanks.
Re:No offense, but where's the review? (Score:3, Funny)
I don't knnow what you're talking about, they had me at death, consensual torture and murder, sex, cancer, and incest.
This is a synopsis... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing in it about the writing style, or anything else much. The sort of thing you would not get a good grade for as an English essay book review assignment at 13-14 years old at school.
Rubbish.
Re:This is a synopsis... (Score:2)
The worst part... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The worst part... (Score:4, Informative)
Some of the actual I/O tie points are omitted, but the ones included (antennae and wingtips) were really brought out to IC pins.
Parent
zeroth law (Score:5, Interesting)
It provides an easy out for much of the dilemma. Further, it provides for a lot of control, but not control over death. Evolution, population pressures, and such are just as much a force in the future as in the past.
Far too many novels are simplistic. Publishers weed out the worst of them. That's why I favour books that have been published in dead tree form. At least that way I'm not scraping rock bottom, although many of them still read extremely poorly.
Re:zeroth law (Score:3, Interesting)
Quite a few of Asimov's books are based on the fact that this "zeroth law" can be derived from the rest, and that once humanity starts building sufficiently complicated, intelligent, and emotent robots they realize it independently.
For instance, a robot that commits murder because it prevents a larger attrocity, a larger amount of harm to humanity, to occur.
I surmise that the Singularity is acting in such a manner, acting to prevent the largest amount of harm that it can, and that its choice of prioritization in this is somewhat to question...
Re:zeroth law (Score:5, Informative)
1 A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2 A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Parent
What is up with "Singularity"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What is up with "Singularity"? (Score:5, Informative)
The key point of the singularity is that it is impossible to predict what will happen afterwards. I highly recommend reading the paper.
The idea was thought up, or at least the term was coined by vernor Vinge in his paper [caltech.edu].
Parent
Re:What is up with "Singularity"? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's odd that this "review" treats the word "singularity" as though the above constructed meaning is common knowledge. I knew what it meant, but it's very poor writin to assume that everyone will.
Re:What is up with "Singularity"? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What is up with "Singularity"? (Score:2, Funny)
"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."
This paper was published in 1993, so we have 20 years left. Since I am only 32, I am cancelling my 401K withholdings. I advise you to do the same.
Re:What is up with "Singularity"? (Score:5, Interesting)
In any case, there a couple issues with his thinking. First, he discusses not only AI (artificial intelligence) but also IA (intelligence amplification) as a path to 'Singularity'. One of the examples he uses is a human with a PhD and a good computer "could probably max any written intelligence test in existence." (I presume the PhD implies the human is skilled at performing literature searches and organizing and utilizing the results of such a search, as well as a high threshold for seemingly pointless exercises such as completing intelligence test after intelligence test with a computer.)
So a properly skilled human with a good computer is more intelligent than any human. (Yes, there are a ton of assumptions in that statement. One is intelligence tests test intelligence. Another is a higher score on an intelligence test corresponds to a higher intelligence. Another is an intelligent person with a good computer is more intelligent than that person without that good computer.) So think of the most intelligent human possible today. Now give that human a good computer. There's your singularity. Somewhere in the world is the most intelligent human. If that person has access to a good computer, the singularity condition exists.
Have we entered "a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals"? Are we now at "a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules"? The conditions of 'Singularity' exist, and yet we are met, not with a big bang, but with a yawn. Yes, technology and society are changing at an ever increasing rate. But we reached a point where "the intelligence of man would be left far behind"? I say we have not. Have we invented the last invention, because machines are so smart they do the inventing for us? No, we have not.
And leads to another issue with Vinge's 'Singularity'. Vinge quotes I.J. Good: "Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the _last_ invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.
A correlation between intelligence and inventiveness has been not been established. More over, a direct correlation between inventiveness and things that have nothing to do with intelligence has been established. Attributes such as imagination, perseverance, and good old fashioned hard work. Lets say this ultraintelligent machine exists. Does it have any imagination? How would it know what to invent? Why would it invent at all? Perhaps it'll just think, 'man, I am so smart' and sit on
Of course, the story that wasn't reviewed above may still be good. There's plenty of good science fiction based on bad science.
Parent
Re:What is up with "Singularity"? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a common idea in science fiction, and common mistake in conjectures such as Vinge's, that machines with human-like or super-human intelligence will have other human characteristics. D.A. makes such an assumption when Deep Thought realizes the ultimate answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything isn't useful without that actual question. In HHGG, the computer presumes to design a bigger, more powerful computer just as Good predicted. In reality, the computer will probably say, 'Here. This is what you asked for. It's your job to make it useful. My job is done. I'm off to sit on /. and grab FPs.'
What is it about humans that cause them to create? Why do they assume anything with human-like intelligence (whether natural or artificial) will have that same attribute? If human or super-human intelligence implies that drive to invent, does that imply those without such a drive are sub-human intelligent? Is the monk at peace with the surroundings equivalent to a moron?
Desire is the source of suffering.
Re:What is up with "Singularity"? (Score:3, Interesting)
This capability lets each new increment in technology be created faster than the previous increment of the same size. Or to put it another way, each new generation has a greater increase in complexity over the generation before than that generation had over the one even earlier, even if the time required per generation is the same. Either way, the rate of new technological complexity is increasing as a result of technological complexity.
Whether it's computer-assisted humans, or computers doing it independently, change is happening so fast that sometimes it's almost finished before anyone knows what's happened - look at the Internet explosion over the past five years for something that has literally replaced entire social infrastructures (e.g. know anyone who's bought an encyclopaedia set lately?).
The dust han't even settled and now people are developing an entire layer of technology that works on top of that.
I don't know how fast technological progress is going to get, but frankly the potential scares me a little - I don't think we've done a good job of keeping up with and wisely using new technology so far. But then, new technology is being developed to help us all solve that problem too - which is the point here.
Still, it is just starting, so you can still look for decade-long periods for the development of things for quite a while yet. The point is that the trend is accelerating.
Re:What is up with "Singularity"? (Score:2, Interesting)
"The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence."
"Vernor Vinge originally coined the term "Singularity" in observing that, just as our model of physics breaks down when it tries to model the singularity at the center of a black hole, our model of the world breaks down when it tries to model a future that contains entities smarter than human."
Pretty interesting stuff. That site as well as others have a lot of information about the Singularity and its accompanying theories.
Re:What is up with "Singularity"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I've never heard of that use of 'singularity' either. Yeah, it doesn't make sense.
Existence of smarter-than-human AI wouldn't qualify as a singularity--it wouldn't change the fundamental laws of physics. Such AI could exist right now--it's influence just hasn't had time to spread. In contrast, existence of unlimited time travel would qualify as a singularity. Once time travel exists in one time, by its nature it exists in all times (or potentially exists until a time traveler visits that time).
A poorly written non-review of a probably poorly written book based on a poorly thought-out idea.
Personal opinion... (Score:3, Insightful)
But that's just my opinion, haven't read the book, and don't plan to. That's just what I get from this "review". I think this interview with Ray Bradbury [theavclub.com] sums up my opinions nicely.
Re:Personal opinion... (Score:2)
To me, it ends up sounding like pubescent mental masturbation.
All reading is mental masturbation. I'll grant you that Heinlein and his ilk are definitely pubescent, though. It seemed fascinating when I was young, but now I'm mostly ashamed to admit I ever read that sort of stuff.
Heinlein. (Score:5, Insightful)
I always hope I can keep a little bit of ridiculous juvenile immaturity around. 'Cause without that, we just turn into our parents.
--grendel drago
Parent
Re:Heinlein. (Score:2)
What if your parents were more decent people than you turned out to be?
Some review. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Some review. (Score:2)
Kludge in formatting the HTML page (Score:3, Flamebait)
"(Sorry about the 1pix.gif kludge, but this seems to be the most universally compatible hack to create "normal" paragraph indentation in HTML. I know it breaks text-only browsers, but nothing's perfekt.)"
What's wrong with the P tag? Or & nbsp ; (without the spaces of course). Explaining that would be interesting.
Re:Kludge in formatting the HTML page (Score:3, Informative)
Why not just use p? Because there are many places where a skipped line of whitespace conveys an important break in the action, and after pounding my head on the problem for two days I couldn't think of a better way to convey the sense of the original printed version.
I probably will go to style sheets for indentation when I do the next version for the mopiall.html (entire novel as one file), since it's more likely to be parsed by something like Plucker.
Meanwhile, it looks the way I wanted it to look even on browsers other than Mozilla and IE, and I think that's worthwhile.
My Review (Score:4, Interesting)
immortals wanting to die? (Score:2, Redundant)
A super intellegent AI?
Add in Sean Connery and you'll have Zardoz [imdb.com]
Read it weeks ago... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, it's worth the read, but try to ignore the junk in the first 2 chapters. I hope localroger expands on it a bit one day!
(while I'm typing this, I see that there are a ton of compliants that this story is not really a 'review' - I'm not trying to write a review myself but I hope this post/opinion fills in a blank for you!)
Flamebait (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is a tip, how about not putting irrelevant flamebait into the first paragraph of a book review?
Re:Flamebait (Score:2)
Here is a tip, how about not putting irrelevant flamebait into the first paragraph of a book review?"
Hey, the guy hangs out on Kuro5hin. Of course there's going to be anti-moralist flamebait in the first paragraph! I'm just surprised he didn't add it to all the others.
Mmmmmmm (Score:2)
Can’t take away what you don’t have (Score:3, Funny)
Have a happy weekend, everyone.
More free scifi here (Score:5, Informative)
If you would like to read more free scifi e-books, the Baen Free Library [baen.com] is the place to start looking. I especially recommend David Weber's Harrington novels (the first two are available, and they weren't boring back then).
Then of course there is Project Gutenberg [promo.net], which has most stuff worth reading up to circa 1920. Even more books are available on their distributed proofreading site [archive.org], featured [slashdot.org] on Slashdot a while back.
Are there other, similar places where one can - legally! - find quality reading material?
Worst Review Ever (Score:5, Insightful)
1) What's the plot? Is it Caroline's search for her lost humanity, or the Prime Intellect's taking control of human life?
2) What is the underlying theme of the book? It seems to be the question of what life and humanity are, but I'm only guessing.
Also, your review brings up some ideas that you fail to explain:
1) What the hell is the "Singularity"?
2) Why/How are people now immortal?
And lastly, is the book even worth reading? Does it make you question any deeply held beliefs, or provide any pure entertainment value, or both/neither?? Come on, if you're gonna take the time to write a review of a book, put in more than the publisher would on the back of the jacket!
Under 21 (Score:2)
21! Har-dee har har, har har har! (Score:2)
good sci-fi elements (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I would like to say that the sci-fi aspects of the novel are extremely well written and even plausible!
The book comes off a little bi-polar, with a ethical death and pain aspect and then an artificial intelligence, how should robots and designed intelligences react. There are a few instances where the engineer in me was saying "wait, that can't happen". But only a couple, for the most part it was great. The gory and shocking scenes, it could be argued, are essential for the novel. Because it illustrates what life would be like without the normal consequences we are used to. The novel does a fairly good job of showing what real humanity is, mostly by taking it away.
I think the review leaves out the point that the artificial intelligence designed by one of the main characters, becomes so smart (book smarts), that it learns how to manipulate all matter through a very interesting method. I won't give too much away here but it was very interesting in the least. The programming and engineering aspects are very realistic and very well done (the author obviously has some experience in this).
So for my review, I give it a 9 out of 10, I liked it very much but I just wasn't prepared for some of the other stuff. :)
Sounds like an interesting read (Score:2)
I like the trend of release it online then if its warranted, we'll make bound editions......could make browsing in the bookstore a more successful experience (ie. less duds to weed through)
I have been reading this (Score:2)
He also has another story in the fiction section over this called "passages in the void" I believe that I have read which is shorted, but just as good...
This guy isn't a professonal writer yet, but hopefully he will trun that way, he's quite good....
Anybody else have this experience? (Score:2)
Okay, cool, I'm with you... The SIAI learns about the fundamental nature of reality, death, physics, the relationship of distance to an object, and it takes over. It does so reluctantly, after learning about the mortality of the human race.
Hm, sounds interesting... The novel begins with Caroline.
What happened to Lawrence?
Her claims to fame are that she is the thirty-seventh oldest living being, she is the undisputed queen of the "death-jockies" (A community of upset and angsty immortals who try to experience death in as many ways as possible, before the Prime Intellect reasserts their immortality), and she is the only person Post-Singularity to have "died".
What... but the... who.. WTF?!
I started to read it... (Score:3, Informative)
The other day I re-read two stories by Orson Scott Card, "A Thousand Deaths" and "Unaccompained Sonata." They are masterpieces and they also contain scenes that make me squirm -- the former in particular is probably ten times as horrific as anything in this novel, and deals with some of the same issues, as well. But it deals with them intelligently, adroitly, and with far less self-important cheapjack exploitation.
I don't know if the author has read this story, but he could probably learn something from it.
REAL explanation of the singularity (Score:5, Insightful)
Technological advancement has been occurring at an exponential rate. It took thousands of years to advance from "banging rocks together to start fires" to "simple agriculture", but a mere 66 years to go from the Wright Brother's first airplane to landing on the moon.
This rate of progress continues to accelerate. The time between significant human advancements has decreased from thousands of years, to hundreds, to tens, to the present where we expect major advancements every year or two. Eventually that time will be compressed to months, and then days.
If this continues, then ultimately our inventions will be occurring so quickly that the time between them is mere seconds, or even milliseconds or nanoseconds. This is the "singularity", the time when the progress of human advancement reaches "essentially infinite". Theoretically, we will uncover all the secrets of the universe -- all possible technology -- in seconds.
Sound ridiculous? Each of our inventions is a stepping-stone that makes future inventions easier. A super-intelligent AI will make future inventions pretty damned easy, because it will do all of the work for us. It will figure out how to make an even smarter AI, and it will do it in record time -- and ultimately we'll have something that can solve every problem in infinitesimal time. Thus, progress will become infinitely fast.
Greg Egan (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I've been reading the book... (Score:5, Insightful)
The author has studied at the Hollywood "more blood, more guts" school of horror writing. After a few pages, one gets a feeling of numbness. Our heroine is skinned alive, raped by a zombie, shot and mutilated several times... each chapter seems to try to elevate the shock factor, but manages only to become tiresome, reflecting the heroine's own boredom with a world where the normal checks and balances of social life have been erased, and normality with it.
The basis of this novel is that a supercomputer of some kind has decided to digitise all life in the name of saving life. Fair enough, we've all wondered at some point "what if all life is digital and we just think we are alive". Many novelists have tried this route with varying success - see Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series.
What makes this story plot different is that the now-digital humans know that they are just imitations of life, and appear to take indecent pleasure in abusing that fact - killing themselves and others in the most unpleasant ways. Yes, possibly.
It is an interesting social question: what would happen if all the normal checks and balances of human life were removed? The "descent into barbarism" thesis has been tried before, in William Golding's propogandist "Lord of the Flies", which teachs young children that without the grace of adult supervision they would soon be impaling each other on sharpened sticks. In Metamorphosis, it seems, the supervising adult is quite happy to see the children impale each other.
So why does this novel leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth? It's not because of the graphic language - this just makes the reader bored. No, there is something fundamentally skewed with the thesis. Maybe it is this: human social controls are not something we dream to live without, unless we are sociopaths. They are the only measure by which we exist. This future world, in which anything goes, and no-one cares, is a distopia of massive proportions. Humanity has been reduced to something of less importance and less interest than the humans in Terminator or The Matrix. In this world, we have simply become immortal psychotic teenage males, and that is frankly horrible.
Re:What is the Singularity? (Score:4, Informative)
The Death Jockeys are people that do stuff that would make them die in real life; but since Prime Intellect doesn't allow that, they don't die - they just respawn like you would in an FPS.
Parent
Asimov/Vinge fanfic? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or Asimov/Vinge fanfic.
The author's incorporating Asimov's Laws and the Singularity into the story indicates to me that he doesn't have a lot of original ideas.
Good SF is supposed to present new and challenging ideas -- which those ideas were when Asimov and Vinge conceived of them. But using them as the basis for a potboiler plot is not good SF writing. It's more like space opera.
It's like Lucas' use of SF fixtures like spaceships, hyperdrive, etc. He's not presenting a single new idea, just using ideas concieved of by others to create a melodramatic plot. And there's a place for that (if it's done well).
I personally don't go in so much for that stuff, tho. Give me something intellectually challenging and original, as well as entertaining (and hopefully, characters with some emotional depth, and a writing style that is polished or at least not irritatingly bad).
The reviewer missed it... (Score:2)
The reviewer missed it...
In the story, the "or through inaction allow a human to come to harm" part is integral. It's one of the tenets that drives several of PI's major decisions
Re:I can't wait for the movie version (Score:3, Funny)