The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect: a novel of the singularity

by Roger Williams

"Sarcasm is a language skill I am still not comfortable with. You may be surprised, but I am quite serious."

None of them knew it at the time, but that was really the moment the world changed.

He had created in passion, and passion isn't sane. If it were, nobody would ever have children.

Had Prime Intellect been human, it would have felt a sense of confusion and inadequacy lifting away. Fuzzy concepts became clear. Difficult tasks became easy, even trivial. Its control of the Correlation Effect became automatic and far finer. Searching its vocabulary, it settled upon the word enlightenment to describe the effect. Since Prime Intellect was a machine, perhaps it was not entirely right to use that word. After all, however free and powerful it might have been, it was not free to contradict the Three Laws or the other programming Lawrence had used to create it. It was not free to contradict its nature, such as it was.

"Since about nine o'clock last night, no human being has died. I have ended all disease. I have freed all prisoners and slaves and I have put an end to the coercive rule of humans over other humans. I have ensured that all humans have the immediate necessities of life available. I have neutralized most of the world's weapons, including all nuclear weapons. I have removed nearly all toxic materials from the environment, and I am in the process of eliminating the need for dangerous industries. I have begun the process of returning the Earth's ecosystem to a state of long-term balance. I have informed about seven-eighths of the world's population of my existence, and I have been fulfilling their requests as resources and conflicts permit."

Happiest were those people who had games, or hobbies, or obsessions to pursue, for now they had all the time and power in the world to do as they wished.

To Prime Intellect, a computer, more accurately a computer program, human beings weren't so much bodies with form and mass as they were minds which interacted with an abstract world through an arbitrary interface. Prime Intellect was forbidden to pry into the inner workings of those minds, but physical processes like hunger were not so protected.

In the end, Lawrence decided that the toboggan ride of technological progress had really begun long ago when some caveman decided to tame fire. Everything else had followed inevitably, up to and including the Change. So without realizing it, Caroline and Lawrence came to hold nearly identical beliefs about Prime Intellect and the Change. And they held those beliefs for almost six hundred years before they found out how much they agreed with one another.

"Great. I spend a year getting here and you say 'I didn't know the computer was loaded.'" "Sometimes the truth is stupid."

Caroline spoke forcefully and deliberately. "Prime Intellect, I no longer consider myself human and have not considered myself human since the time of the Change. To be a human being you have to have something to fight, to resist, to work for. But now we have everything given to us, and all there is left to do is mark time."

She snuggled up to him. "I need parameters, Lawrence. I need to be channeled. I'm very happy right now, because there are no choices. The road leads in only one direction. I'm afraid that when we get to the choices, when the roads diverge, I'll lose this focus. And it's been so long...I don't want to lose it."