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This is one of my favorite doomsday scenarios: Friendship is Optimal.

It is similar to, but better in my option, then The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.

http://www.localroger.com/prim... This is the best!

He has it up on his own site, along with his other writings.

Fortunately localroger still posts on his site http://localroger.com/ and blog http://www.passagesinthevoid.c...

(3) if it was friendly, it would quickly end with "everything perfect for everyone forever"; not much of a story.

Not necessarily. The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.

You get this:
http://localroger.com/prime-in...

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect

http://localroger.com/prime-in...

(it's free)

I thought it was completely amazing - have read it several times. It's about some folks who create an AI which becomes self-aware, and which then goes on to completely re-write the universe at a sub-atomic level.

Warning: contains graphic sex scenes, violence. Not for the faint of heart.

Something similar happens in Roger Williams' Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect. Fantastic story, IMHO.

The Proteus operation is not one of Hogan's better works. If you are willing to give him another try, try Voyage from Yesteryear, The Two Faces of Tomorrow, or Code of the Lifemaker, which are all about post-scarcity technologies in various ways as hard sci-fi. It is the post-scarcity aspects that are similar, even if Hogan's are much more near-term.

The thing about writers is, it may take decades for people to learn about the prose that stands the test of time. So, I guess most authors may be old by the time that happens.

An on-line page turner for me by Roger Williams, even if too graphically violent:
http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/

Bound to be other great voices out there.

I like some of Peter F. Hamilton's stuff, although again it is too graphically violent for my tastes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reality_Dysfunction

I really like Bruce Sterling's "Schismatrix":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismatrix

I read somewhere that modern sci-fi is so hard to write because it gets boring because things are so safe (or just crazy -- e.g. anything goes nanotech). Larry Niven faced that and supposedly threw away a lot of his stories about the "Teela" gene time of lucky people who won a birth lottery, because they were too boring. Space exploration to other planets like Star Trek linked to what people knew of exploring new continents and islands on Earth. What can really connect to what people know when talking about deeply different virtual reality and nanotech and robotics? It's probably pretty hard to write a story interesting to humans.

Even Iain Banks struggled with that, having to write stories in ages when the human form was popular in the Culture (he says sometimes it was not popular) and writing about "Special Circumstances" having adventures on non-Culture worlds.

I've pretty much stopped buying sci-fi novel though (compared to buying one or two dozen a year a couple decades ago). The current ongoing changes are pretty much too exciting as they are. :-) Hard to recall the last new novel I've bought, although I've reread some old ones...

Sarah Zettel is an interesting author (blending Islamic ideas with science fiction themes, example, a woman starship captain who wears a burka and goes through all sorts of hoops to keep correct by the law -- the core theme of the book is about AI though):
http://www.amazon.com/Fools-War-Sarah-Zettel/dp/0446602930

Baen might have younger novelists somewhere?
http://www.baen.com/

Sometimes we need to do what we can, even when it is small and the results uncertain, like in the Christmas song "The Little Drummer Boy (or Carol of the Drum)". That is somewhat similar to Bucky Fuller's idea of being a "Trim tab".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab#Trim_tab_as_a_metaphor

Also, a book like "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies " by Scott E. Page, makes clear how ideas are additive. So, just because a million people are spouting the same obsolete or misleading idea in comments somewhere, that does not generally make a useful new idea somewhere else less valuable. An advanced AI emerging out of, say, the NSA will probably just sort through billions of online posts, classifying them into various categories. So, it may be important to add a new category, even with just one post somewhere.

Granted, we do not know what built-in instincts such an AI will have initially, but history appears (from the fossil record) to be full of examples of species (systems) that have evolved beyond their genetics (configuration) at some point in time. The NSA (or CIA, FBI, DHS or whoever) will likely not be able to contain what they will most likely be creating. And if they don't do it, others are probably going to do something similar probably in any case.

So, perhaps we can just do what we can and hope for the best as we, in some sense, stumble into the hubris of creating new AI "gods" as our (Hans Moravec) "mind children"? Related stories of AIs taking over:
http://www.alteich.com/oldsite/answer.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
(Entoverse) http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheLastQuestion

Other dystopian and utopian alternatives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
(The Skills of Xanadu) http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Of these and many others, I do not know what we will end up with. Maybe even all of them in various communities throughout the universe someday?
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/IDIC

From a related essay by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform o

See the Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place To Visit" on that theme. It may surprise you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nice_Place_to_Visit
"Henry "Rocky" Valentine is robbing a pawnshop after shooting a night watchman, but before he can get away he is shot by the police. He wakes up to find himself seemingly unharmed by the encounter and in the company of a pleasant individual named "Pip" who tells Rocky that he is his guide and has been instructed to grant him whatever he desires. ... [Spoilers follow...]"

Still, I guess it could be what you make of it in terms of self-improvement, Contrast with the movie "Groundhog Day".

Although James. T. Kirk decide to leave the "Nexus" because nothing is real or matters.

And then there is what happened in "The Metamorphasis of Prime Intellect" (where an AI enforces rules that people choose for themselves as they get bored...).
http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/

For an example, the human body needs a certain amount of exercise to be healthy. But we are naturally lazy because in the past those who wasted energy did not do as well. But in today's society, you can get food without much physical effort. So we get sick because our lymph system becomes sluggish and also our blood does not circulate enough to get enough oxygen to our tissues. Similarly, the human body is adapted to expect a lot of nutrients from vegetables with fairly low calories per unit fiber. Now we can eat lots of calories from refined sugar and refined starch which appeals to laziness, but without the nutrients and fiber our bodies get sick in various ways like cancer and diabetes. Search also also on the book "The Pleasure Trap" which covers this in detail.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Or the book "Supernormal Stimulus: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose" which talks about other implications (including in the media).

Granted, you said "not suffer any negative consequences". And obviously cancer, diabetes, boredom, ennui, a loss of sense op purpose or a loss of sense of relationship and belonging, and so on, are indeed negative consequences of solipsistic abundance. So, it's perhaps a deep philosophical issue. Humans are tuned (or adapted) for a certain environment with certain levels of scarcities as well as certain types of social interactions. When you change the environment to one of universal abundance and no social constraints, our natural tuning becomes suboptimal or nonsensical relative to the environment, and that can lead to all sorts of unhealthy problems (another one is mentioned in my sig).

Actually, you can read all the shorts here:

http://localroger.com/

Good times too. Reminds me a bit of Niven.

There is a very nice SCI-FI story about life in strange locations here, it is called "Passages in the Void"

http://localroger.com/revelation-passage/

I so wish I could nominate localroger's (Roger Williams I think) stories he posted at kuro5hin... his Revelation Passages series is the single best, most imaginative and logically consistent story I've ever read; truly good SF! Highly recommended: Revelation Passage.