Pantheon is really good

If you like sci-fi or AI, I strongly recommend it

Pantheon is an animated show about AI¹. It's very good. If you like sci-fi or Americanized anime I'd recommend it. I would love to pay for the show, but I can't find a way to. You can watch it dubiously legally here.

The following are major spoilers, so if you think you’d enjoy the show I strongly recommend watching it first².

My recommendation for most people is to watch the show before reading this.

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But I have some issues. 

‘Integrity’

‘Integrity’ is a MacGuffin. The ‘uploaded intelligences’ (which I shall call sims³) degrade over time. This happens for no coherent reason. It exists so the sims can’t quickly be most of what matters. They can’t overclock and do thousands of years of action in a day. And the showrunners don’t have to figure out what a rapidly growing world of sims would look like⁴.

What a boring decision. Sims aren’t able to do many of the things that would make them unique and create new stories. It’s like having dragons and then saying that they are scared of humans and subsist on sunlight. Rather than being their own thing, sims become superheroes or ghosts. Not everything needs to be an analogy for something else - the nuclear bomb isn’t primarily an analogy, it’s primarily a bomb.

If you allow sims to move at superhuman speed and copy themselves, you have to answer a load of interesting questions:

• How do the sims pay for their existence

• Which sims proliferate the most?

• Can sims coordinate with versions of themselves?

• Can sims specialise and trade?

• How do they avoid being captured and leaking their secrets to other sims?

• Who are you grieving for if someone can come back instantly?

To me these seem like much more interesting stories than “what if every country had a super-hacker?” If you’re interested I recommend the first few chapters of

Robin Hanson

’s Age of Em. I wish someone made a show of this.

Preplanning

Next, relatedly, the sims show very little ability to pre-plan. If I can come up with a better plan than these characters, it’s probably a bad plan. For instance:

• The sims don’t back themselves up, even though this is possible. This is the clear advantage of being a sim. And yet they never die then restart or have an up to date copy. 

• Chanda makes terrible decisions. When he finds the sim-creation technology, he wants to share it with people who can keep it secret, so he gives it to… 6 conflicting intelligence agencies⁵. That seems very likely to cause a race. A mind-bogglingly stupid decision.

• Noone can do game theory. This is meant to be a clever show. So when the baddie threatens to nuke you, you have to come up with better than “I give up”. Even if you’re scared, you’re meant to know that that answer may have caused the bad situation in which you find yourself. And if you know that’s gonna be your plan, then get a better plan. Lori doesn’t have a dead man’s switch on leaking her info, David doesn’t have leverage. Everyone is just making stuff up. It’s beneath them.

If you want to read a story that has clever characters making good plans, perhaps Alexander Wales’ Metropolitan Man. It’s a Superman fanfic and it’s very good.

The overall bleakness

Look, a word of advice. If you’re ever on the run with secret information, tell a journalist. My recommendation would be Kelsey Piper. Say that they can’t release it but if you die, they can. But, but what if the baddies kill me for this? Then they were gonna kill you anyway, but now at least you have leverage. And their fear of said leverage might mean they deal more gently with you.

Characters in this show repeatedly say “no one would believe us” when considering telling their story. Have you seen the current news environment around Big Tech? Journalists are aching to print stories about corrupt tech companies playing god. They would listen to this story and they would probably print it.

This gloom is bizarre. And it feels like a common thing in stories today. Even while people have more power than they ever have, they feel less able to use it. I don’t get it. There has probably never been a better time to be a whistleblower.

To me, this kind of gloom justifies extreme action. Whether that’s pushing for a race with China⁶, the AI board crisis or Peter Thiel wondering if it’s bad the the US can’t waterboard anymore⁷. I worry that when we feel weak, we push for escalation and strongmen. And that’s one thing if we are weak, but I feel heartened about Government seriousness on AI, and if I were in this story, I WOULD TELL THE PRESS!

Conclusion

I really like this show. It’s well-executed and gives lots of context around AI and the singularity. I am sure it will be helpful for starting conversations.

And I understand that a TV show needs a strong central narrative. But why tell a much less interesting story than the world you’ve created? Rather fully explore the technology that is coming down the pike, Pantheon season 1 chooses to be a very good, gloomy, hacker comic. And that’s fun. But it’s much less interesting that really engaging with the possibilities here. 

What is AI going to do to our lives? What are the possibilities of simulated minds? Should we speed up or slow down? I hope season 2 explores this.

1. Pantheon is actually about uploads rather than artificial intelligence, but I think the difference is relatively unimportant

2. Unless you don’t care about spoilers. And honestly, often it takes a really good clip to make me watch a show.

3. In the show they are called UIs but this seems a bad name

4. This might happen in S2 but I don’t care

5.  Including Iranian intelligence, who supposedly employ women now. I find this kind of bending-over-backwards diversity confusing. Who is looking at this (I assume incorrect) depiction and nodding their head sagely? Not a big deal, but I am confused.

6. It’s not hard to find articles breathlessly pushing us towards World War 3. If it were me, I would avoid that

7. I find it darkly funny that Rogan’s next comment is about DEI. They literally do the bit ‘you can’t even waterboard anymore’ ‘yeah it’s DEI gone mad’