Ronny's Reviews > The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect: a novel of the singularity

This book is a short meditation or rumination on the issues of progress and the singularity. There's some handwavey physics to speed things up, and some characters we start to care a bit about after they've been through some rather nasty stuff (at which point, we didn't really care all that much.)
Considering what happens in the book, it's probably just as well that it was done in the order it was, and it does (or should) make you consider the ultimate consequences of an AI (or any person or omnipotent entity) rigidly bound by 3 laws (or 10 commandments).
One thing it has going for it (and also for many people, will be the biggest problem) is that it's rather unflinching in looking at the logical consequences of what happens there, which leads to some behavior that is, to put it mildly, not nice.
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The resolution on the private planet did strike me as somewhat simplistic, since PI has been shown to think about things before, so the thoughts and questions asked there would have been likely to have been considered by PI earlier. Of course, an author that isn't of a godlike intellect will be necessity have a hard time setting up an argument that would break said godlike intellect.
Technical note, there seems to be some parts of an older draft that the editor didn't clean up. Where some narrator mentions that the thoughts that are described can't really be known, but that's never hinted at before, and never picked up again after and seems to be a remnant of a discarded idea.
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