Permutation City

In Science Fiction we know you can scan a human brain. Run a simulation of this brain on a computer. Including a lifelike animation of the persons facial expressions, voice and body. We know that the simulation will be able to carry on a conversation indistinguishable from a conversation with the real person. I.e. the simulation will pass the Turing test with ease. The self-aware Copy can then be uploaded to a virtual city, where it can live forever together with other copies. We have heard it many times. Perhaps, so many times that many of us don't really doubt that it will come to pass some day..... But what is it really, really like to be self-aware in a software environment? I looked around for some good books on the subject. Books that would give some really thoroughly worked out explorations. Finally, I stumbled upon Greg Egans 1994 "Permutation City". And what a real treat this book is! In Greg Egans world it is not easy to be a copy. People react badly to walking up as copies. Sure, we expect most copies to be made from the very old or terminally ill. People for whom it is the last resort. Nevertheless, most can't face living like this. And end up muttering the password "Abulafia" to get out. Only a few have the stomach for living as a copy. Egan convinces us that copies will probably start out being made for the benefit of human survivors. But someday there will be no survivors left. Or worse, after a while the copy might become the original and terminate the original. So, In the end there will only be copies. We better start pay attention! And off we go. Following a logic thatseems inevitable as the copies prepare for eternity. An eternity where resurrecting Adam and Eve in virtual Heaven for amusement - or starting a new Earth simulation from scratch, complete with little algae evolving under the laws of Darwin and billions of computer runtime years - seems the most naturalthings in the world to be doing. A great book -Simon

Greg Egan is the first fiction writer I've seen who takes the concept of AI somewhat seriously (see my detractions below). In virtually all science fiction, AI is either not present (Dune), artificially rare (Star Wars, William Gibson), somehow deficient relative to the "real" intelligence of humans (Star Trek), or easily tamed into servitude (Asimov). Egan thankfully avoids these lame cop-outs and provides a more realistic view of what might happen when our hardware can support human-mind-scale computation.Some of the extrapolation is fairly straightforward, for example the idea that the first humans to have themselves "scanned" and instantiated within a computer as Copies will be the elderly and the fatally ill. Egan goes many orders beyond the straightforward, however, and hits on some big questions: If I get moved into a computer, is it still "me"? Should sentient software be considered legally human? If I am a program running in a computer and I edit my memories and my most basic desires, have I become a new person? If I halt a Copy's program and archive their data indefinitely, have I "killed" the Copy? What would it be like to be forced to live forever within a computer, with no ability to commit suicide ("bail out")? If these are interesting philosophical questions today, they will become much more tangible over the coming decades as (or if, depending on your view) AI develops.Now, my caveats/complaints. A book that seriously considers AI must, I think, include the possibility of super-human AI as well. And Egan, like almost all other authors, conveniently leaves this possibility out. For example, in Permutation City there is an unexplained 17x slowdown of Copies relative to real time. In truth if the average Copy runs at a 17x slowdown, the millionaires among us would cobble together enough supercomputing power to run at a rate equivalent to real time. And the billionaires would have enough hardware to run laps around flesh-and-blood humans. I could easily envision a scenario where every company that doesn't have a management team of hyperspeed Copies would be left in the dust. But Egan tends to stay away from these kinds of unpleasant they-will-become-our-masters scenarios. (In another book of his called Diaspora, Egan does allow for faster-than-human robots called gleisners, but again assumes they will treat is well -- basically a variant of Asimov's stunted-AI). I would love to see Egan put on the Bill Joy hat and deal with superhuman intelligences fairly.The second half of the book relies very heavily on the author's intriguing "Dust Theory". While I don't necessarily find the idea very compelling as a physical theory, it does touch on some ideas that could very well have validity, such as the notion that a universe will exist if it has internal mathematical consistency (the Platonic view to its logical conclusion). Unfortunately at some points in the story the Dust Theory feels like a cheap trick, a bit of magic

One of his last books that maintains some accessibility and entertainment value to balance off his increasingly abstract theses. After this, his books are quite difficult but this one is a lot of fun -- especially for CS people. Be warned however that it's definitely *hard* sf....

Immortality, the nature of conciousness, the nature of reality, and more. This book is hard science fiction at its very best. I cannot think of another book to rival this one in terms of pure intellectual stimulation. Egan takes a few simple ideas and runs with them as well as anyone writing today. The writing is wonderful, the characters are interesting, but oh! the ideas, the ideas are grand! This book took me forever to read; so many times I would read a paragraph then stare into space and think about the ramifications and possibillities. This book should appeal to anyone with an interest in physics, artificial intelligence, and philosophy, or anyone who enjoys thinking about about what it means to be, especially what it means to be YOU

When I read the jacket blurb, I thought, "Ho-hum. Another VR story by some hack who doesn't know jack about computers." But I did read it, and months later, I was still noticing things I had missed when I read it. "Permutation City" has two major strong points: Egan understands computers (he's a part-time programmer), and it shows: I'm a system administrator and part-time programmer myself, and the story just sounds plausible throughout. Secondly, Egan explores all of the ramifications of his assumptions, and the book is filled with "Wow, I hadn't thought about that" moments. Nominally, this novel is about a man who offers people a chance at immortality by simulating them on a computer. On another level, it's about fear of dying, and what constitutes the self.