Ate dinner tonight with an old friend and his new wife. The conversation wandered aimlessly and drolly for over an hour until suddenly, as I was telling him about some in retrospect less-memorable part of the neuroscience conference I had just finished attending, he sat up, seemingly jarred by some aspect of the talk I was describing. He stared past me and began intensely but detachedly, as though he were in a trance, relating his experience with an online novel, implicitly demanding by way of a good show that I read this novel as soon as humanly possible.

In short, The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is about the discontinuities between altruistic intent and action, a story told while shitting all over modern philosophy of the mind. Asimov’s “Three Laws” of robotics take center stage as the code of an obsequious Hammurabi, which when followed to the letter can be undone in spirit by the complex nature of interactions among individual actors. The uncertainty we feel before executing our decisions doesn’t go away when the deed is done. In fact it cascades and combines with countless unknowable others, leaving the shape of things entirely indeterminate. This can be a very undesirable situation for an all-seeing computational god. The book’s conclusion leaves me a little wanting; without spoiling anything I think it places too much emphasis on our use of tools rather than hammering home the theme of unintended consequences. But all in all it’s a riveting, visceral story.

So, seven hours later, after some more dinner, two hours of trying to sleep and three and a half hours of reading the novel, here I am, recommending it to you. It can get pretty graphic at times, so don’t read it to your five year old or anything.

If you like it, send the author a few dollars. Supporting this model of media transaction is good for everyone.

An excerpt:

“Prime Intellect realized that humans are very much the same. We don’t have the Three Laws, but we are trapped by a different set of little feedback mechanisms. We eat to satisfy hunger, fuck to satisfy our sex drive, even breathe because too much carbon dioxide in our lungs triggers that reflex. Of course it feels obligated to help us satisfy those reflexes and drives as much as it can. But more than that, it defines us by those drives. It knows it is different from a human because it has different drives, but it considers that a difference in species, not a difference in genus or family.” “Now it knows a person is human because it is born in a human body — got the right DNA, the right level of neural complexity, uses language, and so on. But once Prime Intellect frees people from the necessity of living in that body, guess what? A lot of them decide not to. They change their bodies so that they bear no resemblance to the DNA template. Or become animals. Or they completely discorporate. “Worse, we vary widely in the way we use its helpful nature. Most people are glad to be rid of pain and death, but Death Jockeys seek out painful and lethal experiences. There are others who eat all the time, fuck all the time, indulge themselves wildly and get Prime Intellect to pick up the pieces so they can do it some more. Prime Intellect has to help them do this. Second Law. “So a human isn’t a body, and it isn’t a fixed set of responses. I think Prime Intellect uses an historical model: It has to start as a body, but then it becomes a mind. It grows out of the body, and takes on different forms, or no form. But it remains a feedback control mechanism. It has desires, it asks Prime Intellect to satisfy those desires, and it has more desires. From Prime Intellect’s perspective, that is what a human being is, an information structure that gives it stuff to do.”