Permutation City

"This book is by Greg Egan, an Australian science fiction writer. He’s well known in circles that think about what I’ve been talking about and pretty much unknown outside them. To my mind, he’s written better about AI than any other writer, because he takes it seriously. He recognizes it represents enormous change. Permutation City is about a time in history when uploading becomes possible and very rich people can upload themselves into machines which operate quickly and in real time. Poorer people have to upload themselves into machines which process very slowly and so they live very slow versions of life. As novels have to, it involves all sorts of plots and derring-do and so on. It was written quite a long time ago, before the turn of the century, and to me, the interesting thing about it is that it’s a book which made me think, ‘Oh! Is this going to be possible sometime soon?’ He has some nice vignettes in it. There’s a chap who is uploaded and finds facing immortality rather daunting. So he decides to rewire his own mind inside the computer to find enormous satisfaction in doing very simple things. He spends several years of subjective time carving chair legs. He programs himself to derive huge satisfaction—utter fulfillment—out of carving the perfect chair leg. Once he does one, he starts again and ends up with a virtual room absolutely full of chair legs… I don’t know. As a science fiction author I would love to write a book about the life of a superintelligent creature, but I’ve got a problem which is that I’m not superintelligent. So I just don’t know what they would think about. What does a superintelligence think about in the shower? Could an ant write a book about the inner life of a human? Probably not. It’s trying to do the same thing. What Egan does is take seriously the idea that humanity is going to change beyond all recognition if and when we get AGI. I think both. I certainly enjoyed it. He’s a good writer. Yes. I think the best two are firstly, Her by Spike Jonze with Joaquin Phoenix. Jones pretends it’s just an ordinary romance, but it isn’t, it’s definitely a film about superintelligence. It’s nice in a bunch of ways: It’s quite realistic and quite plausible which most films about AI are not. Also, the AI is very benign, it doesn’t want to kill us all. So that’s a nice change. The other one is Transcendence with Johnny Depp. It got terrible reviews and it does have some flaws, but it’s a really, really good movie. It shows a character being uploaded, having been shot and fatally wounded. The nature of the uploading is a bit cartoonish, but it’s a really interesting movie. I would not recommend Chappie . Nobody should ever go and see Chappie . It’s appalling. You know what? I think that’s true. Climate change might warm us up a bit, but this stuff could kill us."