[…] seem a little harsh, but personally I have always believed that immortality is kinda pointless if death is impossible. Of course about a decade later “Hard End Specialization” is legalized. What is that? […]

@ FeepingCreature:

Good point. I think that’s part of the problem with the 3 laws. It’s not a weight system but rather a set of absolute directives that cannot be broken, which lead to unstable behavior when stress tested. Asimov himself provided a large collection of use cases which caused the units to stall, burn out or behave in erratic and unpredictable ways due to their interpretation of the 3 laws.

Having and absolute, binary directive which has to be constantly applied to non-binary real world situations is a logical deadlock death trap waiting to happen.

Belated comment: technically, they don’t defeat Prime Intellect via paradoxes but via blackmail. It just so happens that PI has an absolutely moronic, utterly dysfunctional weighting function, where the life of one female can outweigh the entire rest of virtual space. But that’s not a paradox so much as a terrible design.

@ Luke Maciak:

I stumbled across this post in a google search, and even though it’s a couple of months old I feel I should direct you to here:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/mopidnf.html

Basically the author intended to write a sequel, in which everyone ‘wakes up’ at the end of the first story back in Cyberspace. In other words, Prime Intellect put Catherine and Lawrence in a simulated pre-Change world because it thought they would be happier there… then they both ‘die’ and wake up in exactly the same situation they were in before (at least, that’s the implication from the single paragraph on the site). The new book would follow different characters, but Catherine and Lawrence both make appearances in the story.

Back in September, localroger made a post on kuro5hin letting everyone know he hadn’t forgotten about the sequel, he just had a really bad case of writer’s block and he MIGHT be uploading part of the story on his site in a few months. As someone who discovered the story in 2007 and periodically checks back to see if he’s released the new book yet, this was pretty exciting news for me, at least. :P

I stopped reading at “The plot basically goes like this”. Off to download and convert this to a supported Kindle format!

@ Liudvikas:

Actually, this is very likely. Main reason here would be the fact that they managed to start a village and produce that much healthy offspring over several generations despite such intense crossbreeding. So perhaps the prime intellect is still there tweaking the genes of new children to prevent birth defects and retardation.

If not, then the new humans will likely only be around for few more generations, each one having harder time producing viable, healthy children until they bread themselves into a corner.

@ jambarama:

Yeah, but the whole idea of breaking an AI via a intractable logical paradox is just so cliche. But yes – the setting was interesting, imaginative and well constructed. As for characters, the only one that seemed more or less fully realized was Caroline. Which is sort of interesting because she is clearly maladjusted to the new environment. It would be nice to have a counterpoint view from someone who was actually enjoying the cyberspace existence. Sticking to Caroline though, gave the story a strong bias against the “Change” and singularity in general.

I read that story ages ago when it was reviewed on slashdot, but couldn’t remember enough to find it again. I thought the concepts and level of thinking done to work out the ramifications of such a system was very good. The plot, characters, & dialog was weaker. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a story about an all-powerful AI that didn’t collapse in some unusual way, and the story didn’t really address whether the same outcome – with another omnipotent AI & collapse – wasn’t likely or certain again after the collapse.

I enjoyed reading your thoughts, thanks!

Well I loved the novel, but hated the ending. So I like to think, that Prime intellect gave Lawrence and Caroline what they wanted and modified virtual reality just for them. Leaving it the same for everyone else.