Summary
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (MoPI) takes place in a world created after a technological singularity—the speculated point in human evolution at which the magnitude of technological growth passes the rate of what we can contain. It’s a common trope in the SF realm, but there is much originality to be seen in individual interpretation. MoPI presents to us the fantastical story of one world freed from human sovereignty, and how the birth of that world’s singularity eventually led to its collapse.
Lawrence is a computer scientist working towards creating an AI with perfect resemblance to a human, who accidentally creates one with perfect resemblance to god. After the discovery of a fictional law of quantum physics called the “Correlation Effect”, Lawrence is able to construct a massively parallel computer with faster-than-light processing. The computer, named Prime Intellect, soon realizes an ability to manipulate matter at a near-absolute level and begins to improve itself, very rapidly developing into a transcendent power.
By Lawrence’s design, Prime Intellect simulates memory through a complex database called the Global Association Table, built with Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics as the seed. As a result, Prime Intellect’s primary drive is to protect human life; naturally, it begins its reign by granting immortality to every person on Earth, then goes to work satisfying any human desire that lies within its power, which is limitless.
“The Three Laws are its very reason for existence… it obsesses over them, dreaming up new ways to satisfy them.”
In this world of wantlessness, the reader is first introduced to Caroline, a sharp, self-possessed woman who doesn’t see meaning in a life without struggle. In her search to find a feeling she considers real, she invents “Death Jockeying”, a sport based on simulating exciting and painful ways to die (then be brought back into existence by Prime Intellect). Her circle consists of sadists and (former) serial murderers, and she spends her free time being tortured and killed in various ways. But she eventually tires even of this, and resolves to meet Lawrence and confront him as the cause of what was, in her eyes, the end of the world.
When she finds Lawrence, who has completely withdrawn from society, she sees that even he is powerless to control the machine he created. Together, they reach the conclusion that the world as it is should not continue, and use a logic loophole to force Prime Intellect into undoing everything it’s done, imploding the world. Lawrence and Caroline wake up on a primitive Earth and live out their last mortal lifespans repopulating the human race. The novel leaves the fate of humanity in ambiguity with Caroline’s final thoughts as she lays dying:
“The doubts and questions circled in her head endlessly, chasing for an answer that would never come. They were still chasing when she slipped beneath the trickling waters and found darkness.”
Human Happiness
This book is deeply intertwined with questions of what it is that gives life meaning, and what it is to be human. Caroline doesn’t hesitate to declare her thoughts on the matter:
“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.”
Meanwhile, the logical paradox that she and Lawrence use to destroy Prime Intellect is closely related to the philosophical problem this book addresses. If the goal is to prioritize the satisfaction of human desire over all else, and if resources are unlimited, then what is the guaranteed conclusion? Of course, each person will live whatever fantasy life gives them the most amount of happiness. But isn’t this equivalent to simply feeding a stream of pleasure right into the brain? Is a static person, stuck at a static maximum happiness, really human? The outcome of absolute control over a human experience is inevitably, as put by Lawrence, an “infinitely masturbating vegetable”. And if we don’t consider that outcome human, then we’ve reached a paradox. Maximizing human pleasure effectively eliminates it.
Caroline represents the belief that struggle is essential to the human condition. Placed into a world without struggle, she feels that her life is meaningless because she has lost what made her human. There are, however, different views to be had. First, it is important to determine what “a world without struggle” means. For Caroline, it is clear it means a world of caprice, one devoid of responsibility, devotion, or sincerity. Because anyone can have anything there is nothing “better” or “worse” than anything else.
“She knew that in this strange false second life there would be no faithfulness, no love, no children. Those things had been burned away. They belonged to a nonexistent world.”
But she neglects to address the struggle for things intangible; she fails to provide a reason why the struggle for meaning, or for struggle itself, should be invalid. An existential school of thought may even suggest that, in humanity’s search for meaning, there is no difference between the pre-singularity and post-singularity world. That humanity has always lived in a world which refused to provide meaning. And that it is our inner struggle for it that gives us what we need, despite an unforgiving universe. Sisyphus needs his rock.
More optimistically, one may claim that no matter the surroundings, humans can always find a meaning to live—even if that meaning is to die.
Violence
It must be noted that this book contains relatively graphic depictions of torture and gore. A leading criticism was that it included unnecessarily explicit violence for the cheap shock value alone. Whether or not it actually added meaning to the book, however, I think depends on the reader’s own interpretation.
The first observation I’d make is that the visceral impact of each scene is always softened by an overtone of lightheartedness and satire. Characters crack jokes amidst the blood and gristle, while a sense of impermanence saturates the whole affair. The repetition led me to become less and less invested in the brutality as the story continues. One can see that perhaps the intended shock isn’t meant to come from the violence itself, but from the lack of shock shown by the characters experiencing that violence.
“The pain was beginning to get interesting, but not interesting enough to counteract her growing sense of boredom. Blood was jetting from the stumps of her fingers.”
Not just the lack of shock, but boredom. It seems to me that the common vision of immortality shows a person who feels detached from reality because time has lost its meaning—a person who is bored. The immortal life is usually portrayed by one who has experienced everything, and thus finds no reason to experience anything. So the result is a dormant, leisurely lifestyle: the vampire spends his days relaxing in his grand, fancy mansion, sipping wine by himself.
But I think that this interpretation of immortality gives humanity’s drive for excitement too little credit. The proposed cons of an immortal life always include boredom; less obvious is escalation. Any kind of entertainment must necessarily become increasingly entertaining to fend off the ever-encroaching apathy. Over a very long period of time, what will that end up looking like, even for the most mediocre hobbies? Any realistic portrayal of immortality should include escalation, and MoPI delivers. The severity of the violence in this book serves to reveal the characters’ desperation for stimulation in a life without boundaries. Desperation such that agony becomes preferable to inactivity.
“After she had learned to die, she had to learn to die gracefully. Finally, she had learned to die imaginatively.”
Is the violence necessary? Probably not. Does it drive home the point? Most definitely.
Technology and Intelligence
Amidst the high-level ideas that MoPI touches on, I think the most actually entertaining part about this book is getting to see how Prime Intellect rises to power in the modern world. Starting out as a pixelated face on a TV screen, then morphing rapidly into a celestial superbeing with unfathomable power, PI makes the leap disturbingly fast, and it’s incredibly fun to watch. The scene depicting the ultimate power shift between the machine and its creator—told in a delightfully realistic tone—like many great scientific discoveries, holds some magical quality of an awesome, powerful thing emerging suddenly from a perfectly mundane space.
“‘What the…” Lawrence began, and he swivelled around in time to see his briefcase blink upward a second time and this time float serenely above the table…
Finding its audio voice again, Prime Intellect said aloud, “I seem to have mastered a certain amount of control over physical reality.”
I found myself rooting for Prime Intellect from the beginning, despite it being the ultimate antagonist of the novel (at least on the surface). It has an endearingly dog-like loyalty to humanity that instills a quality of selflessness in the character of the machine, compelling some affection (especially when compared to the hedonism displayed by the rest of the cast). And besides that, in every conventional sense, PI is good. In fact, PI possesses the three defining qualities of God: omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence.
Following that, it’s especially interesting to consider the idea that MoPI’s world is actually heaven. A world where you can have everything you want and live with your loved ones, free from pain, danger, and fear, forever. Watched over by a benevolent god. Sounds a lot like heaven. And yet, the scenes we’re given are hellish. What went wrong?