Given eternity in which to work, everyone would eventually stumble into the abyss

In The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, Roger Williams explores the nature of human desire and the abuses of technology by painting a picture of a post-singularity world. It takes place approximately six hundred years in the future, where humans are given godlike control over their environments and are able to do anything, made possible by the supercomputer known as Prime Intellect who has managed to control all aspects of matter through computation.

You can imagine Prime Intellect as a Siri “turned into God”. It operates under Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics which protect humans from unraveling into chaos. While this world rids all problems known to mankind, people begin to lose meaning in their lives due to the lack of consequence, leading to sports such as “death jockeying” - the sport of dying horrific and painful deaths for sport before being resurrected by Prime Intellect just to feel something again.

What I like the most about this book is that it was written by a computer scientist - and it really shows in the way he builds the world. I do believe in the singularity - an inflection point where AI will go from being a silly tool like Chat GPT to an all-knowing entity. The topics of the natural world, level of information to the various possibilities of emulating the physical world feel very reasonable and lively through his writing. One of the critical turning points of the novel where the AI learns to compress all molecular data to grant unwanted immortality was something I have pondered myself to a deep extent.

My only critique of this book is the last chapter. It was said in an interview that Williams had started this book when he was in college and took a ten year pause to figure out a proper ending. The last chapter really feels far off from the previous chapters and doesn’t go into the detail of the actions built up until that point. Without spoiling anything, it just felt very tasteless and pointless all along.

Despite its ending, this book was thrilling from the beginning to (almost) end. This book raises a lot of interesting questions for myself - what is the ultimate goal of creating AI? Is there a stage of satisfaction beyond happiness? What even is real happiness if we can live forever?

Overall Rating: 8/10