3.5 KiB
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (bear in mind the trigger warning!)
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Author: u/Pluvialis Second Age Sauron*
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Score: 6
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Created: 2013-12-22T12:48:07
Post:
Comments:
u/Anakiri [+12] (3 hours later)
The world and the AI and its creator are fun... But I think you have to be pretty forgiving to enjoy this.
The lead is not rational, and not likeable. She is at least interesting for the first 5 chapters, but she becomes less compelling later. The climax is extremely unsatisfying (and nonsensical), and the ending is just... bizarre, on a number of levels. And quite a few times, there's explicit torture porn for paragraphs at a time. Some of it helps the story, but it kind of goes overboard, I think.
There are some good ideas in this story. It examines some uncommon second law conflicts and a unique subculture of a superintelligence-ruled Matrix. It's actually pretty good when we're not looking at Caroline. But the story seems to go to some effort to bury its good ideas. It's short enough it might be worth a read regardless, but keep your expectations low.
u/Pluvialis [+3] Second Age Sauron (5 hours later)
Yeah, you're absolutely right about the characters themselves not being rational, which maybe disqualifies it from this sub, but I thought on the basis of the consequences of AI being more realistic I'd get away with it.
u/noggin-scratcher [+4] I am a happy tree (10 hours later)
See also this blog post, which contains heavy spoilers if you haven't already read to the end, but does a pretty good job of tearing a strip off of the main character.
u/None [+2] (11 hours later)
Once again justifying the unfortunately uncommon warning: AI IS NOT A FREAKING TOY.
u/Pluvialis [+2] Second Age Sauron (13 hours later)
It's funny reading the comments on threads about that latest trailer for Transcendence, so many people opining about Hollywood's tendency to make AI the baddie. I used to agree with them but I've suddenly realised I have at some point acquired complete paranoia about the danger an AI represents.
u/None [+6] (3 days later)
so many people opining about Hollywood's tendency to make AI the baddie
I think that's a proper complaint because usually Hollywood's reasoning behind making AI the baddie is something along the lines "the AI is angry and wants to have revenge" i.e. anthropomorphizing the AI and making it have human emotions which it wasn't necessarily programmed to have. That's an entirely different reasoning than what FAI advocates have.
u/None [+2] (13 hours later)
[removed]
u/None [+6] (2 days later)
"Ponies" were allowed to die if they really wanted to in that story, so I'm pretty sure it would go, "Princess Celestia got her hands on Caroline, and asked her consent to kill her, and Caroline said yes, and died peacefully. THE END."
u/Pluvialis [+1] Second Age Sauron (6 minutes later)
About 60k words or probably a little under 200 standard pages. Read the first couple of chapters to get a feel for the mood (warning: the first contains rather graphic descriptions of death, torture, and rape - the next chapter is much more typical scifi cool stuff).
I'm at Chapter 5 and it seems to be a much more rational treatment of AI than you usually get.