Roger Williams

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)

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.

> 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.

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.

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.)

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/