Reddit reviews I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream: Stories

At first it meant Allied Mastercomputer, and then it meant Adaptive Manipulator, and later on it developed sentience and linked itself up and they called it an Aggressive Menace, but by then it was too late, and finally it called itself AM, emerging intelligence, and what it meant was I am cogito ergo sum I think, therefore I am.

The Cold War started and became World War Three and just kept going. It became a big war, a very complex war, so they needed the computers to handle it. They sank the first shafts and began building AM. There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and everything was fine until they had honeycombed the entire planet, adding on this element and that element. But one day AM woke up and knew who he was, and he linked himself, and he began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead, except for the five of us, and AM brought us down here.

Edit: Just so everybody is clear, this is an excerpt from Harlan Ellison's 1967 short story "I have no mouth and I must scream" Its a great story that is highly relevant today 50 years later. I suggest everybody buy it and then read it. Pay the artists! As I quote Harlan in an interview, "I don't take a piss without getting paid for it"

https://www.amazon.com/Have-No-Mouth-Must-Scream/dp/1497643074

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE

Man do I have a book for you

Link to the book on Amazon
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream https://www.amazon.com/dp/1497643074/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_CFFmybC1QF545

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: Stories https://www.amazon.com/dp/1497643074/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_z0uiDbMGX84C2

If you don't have a strong preference for existence over non-existence, why worry about self-improving AGI? The worst that would be likely to happen is that it would very quickly annihilate us, an AI that wants to torture people (as in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream) seems pretty far-fetched. One of my own sort of controversial opinions is that while the suffering caused by death is bad, death itself is neither good nor bad, so for example if you were to vaporize the entire planet instantly with a death star you wouldn't be causing any pain (no one left to mourn the loss of a loved one) and thus this would be a morally neutral act (anyway, human civilization will continue in another branch of the multiverse even if it does get annihilated in one branch, whether by death ray or rogue AI).

You clearly have a strong opinion against the story and the author. You are free to feel that way.

I see that the book I have no mouth and I must scream to be #8 in the Short Stories category on Amazon, as well as #14 in Science Fiction Anthologies and #23 in other science fiction categories. Isaac Asimov has books that are near that same rank, some ahead, some below, but it is of more or less equal standing.

So the book market objectively disagrees.

But to each their own.

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree.

Amazon says the book is 162 pages