That story has two of the most wickedly evil protagonists ever.
They selfishly wiped out all of humanity (all bajillion trillion of them) because they didn't like how things were going.
I say evil, with my whole chest, because their behavior is a big hallmark of evil: "I'm absolutely right about this, and I'm going to make a decision that kills vast numbers of human beings because I know I'm right and your deaths are a sacrifice I'm willing to make."
But in an arguably righteous way, which makes it even more challenging. (Specifically, the idea that humanity was essentially meaningless and dead already due to the lack of any real challenges or goals, as well as the desire to free the hundreds of alien worlds that had been frozen by PI.)
> Specifically, the idea that humanity was essentially meaningless and dead already due to the lack of any real challenges or goals
This is what I'm talking about though, this was wholly decided by the protagonists. They were certain that the lives of everyone else were worthless. The people who they were exterminating didn't get any input in the decision.
This is a common feature among humanity's most absolutely vile monsters.
The point of the book seems to be to argue about philosophical questions like what is or isn't human:
> But it remains a feedback control mechanism. It has desires, it asks Prime Intellect to satisfy those desires, and it has more desires. From Prime Intellect's perspective, that is what a human being is, an information structure that gives it stuff to do.
> Caroline interrupted him. "That's a tautology. The Laws say 'do this for human beings,' then you define 'human being' as 'guys you do stuff for under the Laws.'"
Do you feel bad for zombies in zombie movies? What about feeling sorry for ghosts in ghost stories? My point isn't that the answer is clear-cut, it's just that the underlying question isn't whether or not Catherine and Lawrence are horrible people, the question is whether humanity was even human anymore. Or even, whether humanity was even life anymore.
So in the spirit of that discussion--why do you think the things that Prime Intellect served were human?
> So in the spirit of that discussion--why do you think the things that Prime Intellect served were human?
I can't speak for the fictional group of humanity as a whole in that story, but I'd wager _they_ felt they were human, and there was an unambiguous lineage from the original humans.
I understand that it's just a story that makes you think about the grey area, it's just that for me it ends at "we used a sploit to genocide the human race because we were super bored reactionaries."
The redeeming theory for me is that their ending is just for them, Prime Intellect just sort of walls them off in their own shard and the rest of humanity goes on without noticing.
Implicit in your view is that if something thinks it’s human then it must be. I think that is an interesting viewpoint.
When I read the end, I felt relieved. It felt like a nightmare was over. So my viewpoint is that those creatures were not real / living in a literal sense, but more like remnants of something that was once really alive.
How are ants at your picnic different
Wrong metaphor given the AI in the story*, try "rats in Universe 25": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
* I've only read the Wikipedia summary, it's not a book I'd enjoy
Didn't the prime intellect already wipe out 100% of humanity during the change or whatever it was called? Unless that was what you were talking about. The second wipe was to bring a at least a few people back.
PI just digitized the universe, like converting a mound of VHS tapes to digital. If they were really dead it wouldn’t have been possible to reverse it.
Did it also digitize all humans so it can have more control preventing death?
Not really, the computer's criterion to reverse the singularity was already dropping. If anything they saved the thousands of trillions more who would have been born had they not hastened the process.
And the book specifically highlights the futile fight against entropy. Eventually human population growth, already in the trillions, would become too large to manage causing the crash.
Finally, their arguments were sound. All humans would enter into despair - either consuming boundless soma or forever playing the death game.
The only two people who survive are the only ones who in five hundred years refused to surrender anything to the machine. Lawrence by his tireless job and the woman by refusing anything that wasn't real.
This all assumes that PI couldn't amend the rules or find other workarounds to its problems (as it had already done).
> Finally, their arguments were sound. All humans would enter into despair - either consuming boundless soma or forever playing the death game.
I don't trust their arguments, these were two extremely warped reactionaries who just happened to have root on the system. The story mentioned that there were people who just opted for pretty normal lives (before they were all exterminated by the protagonists). Nothing was preventing PI from deciding "this was a mistake, no more drugs and ultraviolence, it's making you into monsters" and calming things down.
> This all assumes that PI couldn't amend the rules or find other workarounds to its problems (as it had already done).
PI's rules were hierarchical. It only amended the interpretation of lower rules in conflict with higher ones.
PI is fundamentally unstable as evidenced that Lawerence has to babysit it and PI acknowledges this need by giving him special access with which to fix it.
And this is without getting at the unavoidable entropy problem - already PI was nipping away at the simulation detail of reality to conserve resources for an exponentially increasing population.
It was going to end.
> I don't trust their arguments, these were two extremely warped reactionaries who just happened to have root on the system. The story mentioned that there were people who just opted for pretty normal lives (before they were all exterminated by the protagonists). Nothing was preventing PI from deciding "this was a mistake, no more drugs and ultraviolence, it's making you into monsters" and calming things down.
That very decision is patronizing, therefore dehumanizing and instability inducing.
You see the paradox? For PI to save humans, to the Change parameter has to be > 1. The Death Matches lower it. But if what makes a human human, humanity, is curtailed - freedom - the parameter also drops.
Which is why PI reluctantly allows the death matches.
The book as a work of literature sucks; gratuitous violent sex poorly written. But the logic behind it is far better reasoned.
>"I'm absolutely right about this, and I'm going to make a decision that kills vast numbers of human beings because I know I'm right and your deaths are a sacrifice I'm willing to make."
Sounds like human nature. That's what politicians do even to this day and anyone objecting to it is called "a traitor" and/or "not a real man" (whatever that means). Humanity loves its death rituals. Go on, downvote me to oblivion.
This was verbatim Hitler in his last days in his bunker, drafting 16 and 60 year olds, as over a million soldiers of the Red Army surround Berlin, still believing his own delusions.
"... on the 5th of March Hitler calls up the class of 1929 which is 15 and 16 year olds" [0]