From: Brent Allsop (allsop@extropy.org)
Date: Wed Feb 26 2003 - 20:49:42 MST
Folks,
Did anyone else besides me reed this
story?
Warning, spoilers... I give away the
ending here.
To me it's basically a luddite story.
A great programmer finally succeeds in
making a reasonably intelligent
computer. When this is ported to
powerful hardware it makes a discovery
about physics that magically gives it
supernatural powers to manipulate
physical reality. This leads to a kind
of singularity where the computer all by
itself almost instantly becomes
all-powerful.
This AI is, for some reason, irrevocably
based on Asimov's 3 laws of robotics.
Evidently it would make to system to
"unstable" to change any of these rules.
So it effectively stops all death (first
law) and gives all humans anything they
want (second law). It wipes out all
other alien intelligence in the universe
simply because they don't fall into the
definition of "human" and hence are not
included in the 3 laws.
Humanity is apparently reduced to one of
two types. Either they do nothing but
eternally seek drug induced orgasmic
highs (The AI gives everyone anything
they want), or they turn into "death
jockeys" that try out all imaginable
ways to die or be killed - only to
unfortunately be thwarted in the end by
"prime intellect".
In the end Carolyn, the heroin and
primary "Death Jockey" points out to
prime intellect that these two types of
existence are not in any way human - and
that the real humanity that once
existed, with all its misery to
"struggle against" has been destroyed.
So the AI ends up destroying itself
leaving the original programmer and
Carolyn as the only two beings as kind
of an Adam and Eve on a virgin earth to
restart everything.
They have children and of course teach
them to abhor technology of any kind.
I wonder if the author truly lusts after
such a lonely (except for the one
dedicated sexual babe) technology free
existence or if he thinks such would be
a terrible, yet unavoidable final result
of where technology ultimately must
lead.
Like most all other stories in existence
and their attempt to find ways to
justify miserable primitive existences I
didn't like it at all.
Anyway, it seemed to have a good start,
that I enjoyed. But the ending or the
ultimate premise to the whole story I
didn't like at all.
Did anyone else have any different
thoughts about it?
Brent Allsop
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-extropians@extropy.org
[mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org]On
Behalf Of Robert J. Bradbury
Sent: Friday, February 21, 2003 8:56 AM
To: Extropy List
Subject: The Metamorphosis of Prime
Intellect
The singularity doesn't get mentioned on
/. all that frequently.
Nor does a "Super-Intelligent Artificial
Intelligence".
Variations on Asimov's three laws of
robotics seem to be included.
Starting URL seems to be here:
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid
=03/02/10/1140249&mode=thread&tid=126&ti
d=192
Seems to be from Kuro5hin
(http://www.kuro5hin.org/)
I think one can safely claim to be out
of the loop when the citation
of this author only raises eyebrows and
evokes "who is that?"
as a response.
R.
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