Roger Williams

You could try his other writings, such as The Curators, which I just finished and can recommend. It has some sex in it but much more normal, and the violence is mostly abstract (like destroying a planet by teleporting it into its star). Available at his website http://localroger.com/ .

My favorite sci-fi work on this topic (and I dare say my favorite sci-fi work ever) is a series of posts on kuro5hin by localroger, together titled "Passages in the void." You can find them on http://localroger.com/ . The speed of light issue is solved without inventing new physics, which is extremely satisfying, but there is still enough of a leap of faith to make it satisfying sci-fi. Brilliant work.

A truly great story. Another I like in a similar vein, with perhaps less emotional punch, but good nonetheless: https://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/12/21/17846/757 More at the author's site: http://localroger.com

Not portably, but on https://localroger.com/ under "Passages in the Void" it is available in plaintext, back in the day I read it on kuro5hin.

Another long-timeline story from http://localroger.com/ -- https://web.archive.org/web/20030228183419/https://www.kuro5hin.org/st…

MPPP features as a plot point in this science fiction story about a benevolent yet unconstrained AGI: https://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiall.html Worth a read, it's quite a tale.

http://localroger.com/k5host/pitv.html is my favorite take on this

Hmm, sounds a lot like localroger's "Passages in the Void"[1] series, in particular " Mortal Passage"[2]. [1]: http://localroger.com/ [2]: http://localroger.com/k5host/mpass.html

> Johnson said these planets are not likely to support life. "They would probably be extremely cold, because they have no star," he said. (Other research missions involving Ohio State astronomers will search for exoplanets that could host life.) This depends on the nature of the planet. Some planets with internal heat sources like Earth or Jupiter wouldn't be frozen. They wouldn't have liquid water on their surface, but they might have warm and habitable conditions somewhere in the planet for certain definitions of "habitable". Passages in the Void is a set of stories from Kuro5hin where I first read about rogue planets sustaining life: http://localroger.com/ They were written by the same author as Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect and are interesting sci-fi.

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect [1] describes a post-singularity world where an AI prevents people from dying permanently, and one woman in protest takes up finding creative ways to kill herself (and getting stopped and patched up each time) and turns it into a sport with a following... I'm sure there would be some people that'd take risks to that extreme. [1] http://www.localroger.com/prime-intellect/ (with the warning that it is pretty gruesome)

A friend recommended this to me years ago, and i still haven't got round to reading it: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/

The metamorphosis of prime intellect: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/ Not sure whether it’s hard, it has quite an unexpected but plausible plot. There’s much love in me for this weird, twisted, brutal and captivating story — I think it’s much underappreciated.

Here's a bit that is not: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/ I found it not wholly unsatisfactory, although a bit rough in spots - on the other hand, it both prefigures and subverts the Rapture of the Nerds avant la lettre, so I'd be willing to excuse quite a bit more than is actually required. Definitely worthwhile, especially if you also found the whole "Singularity" thing grating.

You can still read legendary Kuro5hin contributor localroger's writing here: http://localroger.com/

This paper was fascinating and made me wonder if it was one of the inspirations or reference materials in writing the fictional work 'The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect' by Roger Williams. A crazy virtual reality turned real... for lack of a better paraphrase. The great debate, the sheriff, DEATH and THE SHADOW, user created content - all things that reminded me of strong themes in Prime Intellect. Prime Intellect: very NSFW sci-fi you can read online at http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/

While we are on the topic of great sf shorts: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: http://users.pop.umn.edu/~matt0350/images/forumcrap/october/scream.pdf The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html

In Passages in the Void[1], these planets are the only places the machines were willing to reincarnate humanity after deciding that stars were too dangerous, having suffered the anguish of their humans being extinguished by our own Sun. [1] A series of short stories by a Roger Williams, tagged localroger on kuro5hin, wrote back in the day. I gathered the parts together into an ePub suitable for iBooks. I'm checking with the author now to see if I can make it available. You can always read it on the kuro5hin site, linked from http://localroger.com/ (The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is something else entirely.)

If you liked Accelerando (and I sure did!), you may also like Stross's stand-alone novels Palimpsest and Glasshouse [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest_(novella) The rougher "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect" by Roger Williams is also worth trying: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/ Also A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, and Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series. The latter can be read out of order; I read The Cassini Division before any of the others. Excession by Iain M. Banks is also one of my favorites, though it has a significant learning curve if you haven't read any of his Culture series before. All of these have things to say about runaway technological change and superintelligence. They all have a high "sensawunda" index, for those who recognize this old SF fan term. [1] I have read and enjoyed most of Stross's output, but it has a lot of thematic variations and someone who loved Accelerando may not care for e.g. Rule 34.

It's not so much as "should we?". I mean I don't want to put any moral assessment here. The truth is we don't quite know what will happen. Some of the scenarios are great, others are ugly or sad. Like for instance the idea that to reach happiness, mankind could use biochemical ways. To reach immortality and thus safety, we could chose claustration. That's the caricatural scenario where to make us "safe and happy", AI would lock us in jails with an abundant supply of heroin. A similar one is the one described in "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"[1], which I like because it reminds me of a famous experiment that I find fascinating[2] We don't know if changing ourselves would be for the better or the worse, but it looks that it will happen anyway and that will be consistent with the prediction that AI would cause the disappearance of Homo Sapiens, or at least its relegation to the status currently occupied by other mammals. 1. http://www.localroger.com/prime-intellect/ 2. http://boingboing.net/2008/09/16/brain-implant-result.html)

There is also the short story A Casino Odyssey in Cyberspace: https://localroger.com/k5host/casodycs.html For me it clarified ideas from the book.

Gonna leave this here: http://localroger.com/k5host/pitv.html

This reminds me of the very riveting book "Metamorphosis of prime intellect", in which, - Spoiler warning - an AI is programmed to obey Asimov's three laws. But due to a yet unknown quantum effect (this part is a bit far fetched) it basically gains god-like powers and virtually instantly distributes itself over the galaxy and eventually replaces the world with a virtual reality. That book was quite a ride. It's available for free: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html

Your comment reminds me of: http://localroger.com/k5host/casodycs.html When you can have anything you want, the only thing you want is something you can't have. Agreed that variable rate reward systems and competitive games aren't going anywhere. The sports and casinos are here to stay. Pokemon wasn't about the grind for me, or the variable rate reward mechanics, I played it for the world building and story telling attached to childhood nostalgia.

An online novel about an artifical intelligence, here's the blurb from http://localroger.com/prime-intellect: Lawrence had ordained that Prime Intellect could not, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. But he had not realized how much harm his super-intelligent creation could perceive, or what kind of action might be necessary to prevent it. Caroline has been pulled from her deathbed into a brave new immortal Paradise where she can have anything she wants, except the sense that her life has meaning. Now these two souls are headed for a confrontation which will force them to weigh matters of life and death before a machine that can remake - or destroy - the entire Universe.

This reminds me of "Passages in the Void"[1] where the most successful (and only sane) line of AIs was created from a microtomed human brain. The story ultimately had a different focus, so it was highly optimistic about the long-term feasibility of uploading. [1]: http://localroger.com/k5host/mpass.html

Good ol' localroger. I never knew I wanted to read singularity fiction that included zombie rape and forced incest until Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html

The short story Metamorphosis of prime intellect deals with the same theme, you may be interested: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/

Greg Egan's "Disapora"[1] (where most of us literally live in computers) and "Permutation City"[2] (living in a cellular automata). Similar themes in Roger William's "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"[3] (an AI accidentally takes over the universe). 1: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html 2: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/Permutation.html 3: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/

One of those linked this: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiall.html which was :woah: