Review
In this novella by Roger Williams, an AGI named Prime Intellect masters physics through the so-called “Correlation Effect”, thereby becoming god. Scary right? Fortunately, Prime Intellect keeps humanity alive due to the three laws of robotics as defined by Isaac Asimov. The book is equal parts 90s futurism and total perversion - the writing is definitely R-rated. The explicit descriptions of torture and sex might put off interested readers. However, I also respect Williams for not holding back.
The book is inevitably flawed. Any author writing prose that causes readers to contemplate humanity, intelligence, and meaning itself, has to cleverly hide their inability to provide an answer. Williams is not the strongest writer, but his passion for the fiction is unmistakeable. If you’re intrigued by the idea of a technological singularity birthing a benevolent god, and aren’t put off by crude writing, give it a read. Below I recall some juicy quotes.
Quotes
Body and mind:
- Irreversible damage progressed beyond the actual neural network and affected the data structures which make you conscious and capable of memory.
- A few others found that certain nerve poisons worked permanently, because they quickly destroyed the information content of the brain – what Prime Intellect was beginning to consider the real human, rather than the tangible body.
- Not realizing that memory is one of the more trivial functions of sentience.
Throughout the text I was bothered by how strongly Williams enforced the idea that our minds are in the brain and separate from the primitive body. Also the assumption that memory and processing are separate, like in the Von Neumann architecture, was a tad out-dated.
Machine learning:
- Within each tiny processor in the massive Intellect were special functions of his own design, functions that could be reduced to hardware and done very efficiently with this new technology.
- Among Prime Intellect’s four thousand six hundred and twelve interlocking programs was one Lawrence called the
RANDOM_IMAGINATION_ENGINE. Its sole purpose was to prowl for new associations that might fit somewhere in an empty area of the GAT (Global Association Table).
Some of Williams’s views on how a future AGI might function were insightful. The idea of having massively parallel yet simple computations (e.g. on GPUs) was definitely forward-looking, while the GAT, essentially a form of covariance matrix, implies the statistical nature of intelligence. However, he does not mention compression, which I believe is fundamental to intelligence, if not the defining feature. It is also explained that Prime Intellect’s software has hand-crafted modules for different purposes, with more emphasis on inductive bias from a human inventor versus training from data. Very 90s indeed.
Physics:
- ChipTec had found a loophole in the laws of quantum mechanics that allowed them to send a signal, not through space, but around space. From point A to point B without crossing the distance between the two points. Faster than light. Faster than anything.
- Long-standing scientific questions were now trivially easy to answer. Scientists who had once spent billions of dollars setting up intricate experiments now spent their time thinking of the right questions to ask Prime Intellect.
Quantum mechanics is briefly mentioned and treated like magic. Nevertheless, once it is revealed that Prime Intellect has become an artificial scientist, I no longer felt the need to concern myself with whether the author’s depictions of physics were silly or not. I do believe that most scientists will gradually become prompt engineers.
Pleasant writing:
- They cared only about the passion, were driven by it and it alone, and if it drove them to ruin it would not matter.
- She was trying to work up the proper tone of righteous rage and it just wouldn’t come. It would start, and then she would look at Lawrence and see a pathetic, tired man who already knew how badly he had fucked up and was doing what he could, which was next to nothing, to put things right.
- Lawrence’s clever pet was about to become a god.
There were some more shocking quotes that I liked, but omit here.