The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect

loucura! writes "Kuro5hin's localroger has published (online currently, dead-tree soon hopefully) an interesting novel on the Singularity titled The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect . While some of its content is not for the squeamish, nor for children (in that pseudo-moral sense that children aren't mature enough to handle reading about subjects like death, consensual torture and murder, sex, cancer, and incest), the book evokes a plausible reality before and after the "Singularity." The introduction page has a warning: "This online novel contains strong language and explicit violence. If you are under 21 years old, or easily offended, please leave." If you're willing to look past that, read the rest of loucura!'s review, below.

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
author	Roger "localroger" Williams
pages	(n/a)
publisher	Kuro5hin.org
rating	8 of 10
reviewer	loucura!
ISBN	(n/a)
summary	Lawrence had ordained that Prime Intellect could not, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. But he had not realized how much harm his super-intelligent creation could perceive ...

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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Some review.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a reader of kuro5hin I was wondering if this book was worth reading. Your review did little to answer this question, since it is only a plot summary. I'd be surprised this was even posted but we all know Slashdot's editorial standards...

Re:What is up with "Singularity"?

[zapp]

The singularity, as any google search would reveal, is a predicted event in which AI surpases human intelligence. Since that AI will be smarter than us, it will create an even smarter AI even faster, and within the matter of days it is said we will be as cockroaches to them as cockroaches are to us (atleast, intellectually).

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].

Re:What is the Singularity?

[damiam]

In the book (which I have read), the Singularity is when Prime Intellect happens upon principles of physics that allow it to basically do whatever it wants - stuff like modifying any matter anywhere in any way and transporting it instantly to anywhere. Since the Three Laws require it to help humans, it goes and cures cancer, disarms all nuclear weapons, etc. It creates new processors and expands itself as necessary, to become the governing force of the universe. Since it now has the power to prevent death, it is required to under the First Law.

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.

More free scifi here

[de la mettrie]

These links have been thrown around a lot on Slashdot already, but I think they deserve to be posted at least once in every story about books...

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?

Re:Kludge in formatting the HTML page

[Anonymous Coward]

The P tag doesn't indent.

You shouldn't be concerned with that. If it's a new paragraph, you should use <P>. HTML is not supposed to be used for layout; if you want to control the layout, create a pdf version instead. Otherwise, use the tags as they were intended.

Re:zeroth law

[SquadBoy]

Odd that this should come along just as I've gotten done reading Brin's, Bear's, and Benford's Foundation books. First of all the person doing the review got the 1st law wrong or they got it wrong in the book. See below. Clearly "Prime Intellect" had a correct version of the 1st law because it is from there that the zeroth law is derived. And you are correct in Asimov's Foundation prequels he had Dors kill a man to defend Hari because the robots thought that Hari was the key to survival of the human race. Of course one must note that the conflict almost killed Dors. And of course the zeroth law is what lead Daneel to try and shepherd humanity towards a stable future with the Empire and in fact lead him to decide that the Earth had to be destroyed to help the race. And of course in Benford's Foundation book he postulates that robots wiped out any aliens they came accross to ensure that humans would survive. So yes it is clear that Prime Intellect has a version of the zeroth law. Interesting is that "the killer B's" seem to decide that having very powerful creatures with the zeroth law around is not a very good thing.

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.

I started to read it...

[The Gline]

...and then I remembered why the vast majority of web-published fiction is lousy.

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.

Greg Egan

[superdoo]

I've always enjoyed Greg Egan [netspace.net.au]'s's stories. They often deal with bizarre post-Singularity-type themes.

Re:More free scifi here

[Anonymous Coward]

> Are there other, similar places where one can - legally! - find quality reading material?

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/

http://www.ipl.org/div/reading/

are two large meta-indexes of free, legal online books and other texts.

Re:What is a Cauchy surface (in layman's terms)?

[phil reed]

A Cauchy surface is actually a boundary in space-time that separates a non-time-travel part of the universe from a time-travel-enabled part of the universe. It's basically defined by the light-travel cone that originates from the event that spawns a time machine. The equations of General Relativity allow for time machines, but the reach of a time machine cannot exceed the speed of light, Example: We might invent a time machine on Earth. However, Alpha Centauri would not be reachable by time travel for 4.3 years since it takes light 4.3 years to reach from here to there. Points inside that cone could be reached more than once by use of a time machine, therefore they are inside the Cauchy surface. Another implication is that once a time machine is invented, you could travel into the past, but not to a time prior to the invention of the machine.

How this plays into my comment is that the person I replied to was implying that as soon as a time machine becomes available, the entire universe, including it's entire past history, could be reached by it. According to Cauchy's analysis of General Relativity, this is not true.

Re:The worst part...

[localroger]

The moth diagram is an actual schematic diagram of a power supply integrated circuit. I'd give you the part number but I drew it in 1994 and I've forgotten where I found it.

Some of the actual I/O tie points are omitted, but the ones included (antennae and wingtips) were really brought out to IC pins.

Re:Kludge in formatting the HTML page

[localroger]

My goal was for it to format in every browser I've ever used. This includes Netscape 2.0 and Arachne. I failed in Arachne; it doesn't understand VALIGN in the computer-dialogue tables. But the paragraph indentations work.

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.