Note on Pantheon (the show)

Pantheon is a two-season animated series based on a series of short stories by Ken Liu. I wrote this the night after we finished the second season.

Pantheon is ostensibly about intelligence, but more about the politics of intelligence and existence than about ethics thereof, or even about consciousness. The first season handles the problem of private companies experimentally—and imperfectly—uploading individuals to the cloud (via sci-fi technologies that allow us to destructively scan brains). It handles the megalomaniacal tech visionary, the greedy technocapitalist, and eventually the world-power asymmetry approaches to the technology, as well as exploring the concentrated power of those that are uploaded (three initially, all with quite different outlooks).

A billionaire-genius-tech-founder type secretly invents a way to upload humans to digital lives, but it is critically flawed; the beings erode as they compute. The character, “Holstrom”, is a Jobs-like figure with an obvious nod to Bolstrom: cult of personality, dying of cancer, brilliant, punishing.

A clone of Holstrom is raised to be identical to him—a second coming—so that he can fix “The Flaw” in the upload process, which the original could not.

A brilliant girl loses her father, an employee of Holstrom’s company (“Logorhythms”), to cancer; unbeknownst to us (and his daughter), he has elected to be the first uploaded. His wife is told that the procedure failed. It obviously does not, and the man—David Kim—is tested, contained, and put to work.

A woman on life support is uploaded by Holstrom’s company for a hedge fund to exploit market inefficiencies after death (sobering). She escapes, contacts her husband, and discovers and works to free David.

Separately, an Indian competitor to Logorhythms has developed a similar technology. Its CEO learns the lead on the program—an inventing-and-patenting guy, for some reason—has been talking to Logorhythms, and violently kidnaps and uploads him in punishment. The man, Vinod, is awake for the procedure. The twisted, decayed consciousnesses of prior test subjects (people taken from slums in exchange for a better life for their families) free him.

The first season of Pantheon has no qualms about the power of digital intelligence, and intelligence in general. Vinod, one of the few first successful UIs, violently murders his CEO and said CEO’s family. He does so by manipulating the family home entirely digitally, sending staff home with digital instructions, setting the apartment on fire, trapping the CEO’s son in the pool by closing the cover over him while swimming laps. Later, the same UI threatens nuclear war (well, threatens a nuclear attack on one family home) and shares schematics for the uploading technology with the major world powers.

At the same time, Pantheon is not revelatory or worshipful about intelligence. Over time, we learn that David Kim was a mind on-par with Holstrom’s, but with a sound personality. David is probably the best character in the series—certainly the most admirable. He is a character with depth, and with, well, character: patience, love, creativity, joy, measured ego.

The first season floored me; it drove me deep into trying to understand what it would feel like to be a program. I still have an itch I cannot scratch there. What senses can you imagine being native, to a digital intelligence? What would digital space feel like? The “easy problems” of digital intelligence lead to all sorts of odd, fruitful creative places.

The end of Pantheon was a reminder. For the well-adjusted mind—for those who love humans, who love each other, who love themselves (but not too much)—there are sufficiencies, and there is love for the living of life. One of the main characters fosters into evolution a grateful superintelligent god-like beyond-something at the moment of their death (for what it’s worth, they die a number of times, never permanently; there are real threats and real death, even in the machine, but there is an evermore-ness to this story—evermore intelligence, evermore time, evermore knowledge and creativity to solve the problems we must). The superbeing, previously a great threat and evil, invites the main characters to the centre of the universe (or thereabouts), to see the next great thing. The characters themselves are gods by this point. And they look lovingly upon their world, and choose to forget their godhood, and forget what they have done, and live their lives again.

Pantheon also brushes past the fears and panics of “Created Intelligences”, which we speak of as “Artificial General Intelligence”. They exist; they come alive early in the second season—superintelligences, actually, made from uploaded human code. But alignment is not an issue. The original is family; it goes rogue at a critical point, but only to disappear—it does no harm. The possibility is not swept under the rug (to the show’s credit, it is also not made explicit. Pantheon rarely forces your understanding). There is the tension, the fear, the sharp intake of air. And it does not eventuate.