Slashdot Mirror
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
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.
Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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...
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.
no comment
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.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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 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, which has most stuff worth reading up to circa 1920. Even more books are available on their distributed proofreading site, featured on Slashdot a while back.
Are there other, similar places where one can - legally! - find quality reading material?
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.
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.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
...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.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
I've always enjoyed Greg Egan's's stories. They often deal with bizarre post-Singularity-type themes.
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.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Some of the actual I/O tie points are omitted, but the ones included (antennae and wingtips) were really brought out to IC pins.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
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.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]