Pantheon creator on uploading our brains to the internet

“Criminally underrated.”

“One of the best animated series I ever watched.”

“Legitimately one of the best sci-fi shows of the past decade.”

These are some of the comments you’ll run into when you search reviews for Pantheon, an animated series about a world in which shadowy tech firms have found a way to scan and upload human brains onto the internet, inadvertently creating a new, superpowered, and potentially immortal race of people referred to as “uploaded intelligence.”

“One of the best” because Pantheon — in addition to having a well-crafted, suspenseful, and heartfelt narrative about love and loss — thoughtfully engages with both the technical and philosophical questions raised by its cerebral premise: Is a perfect digital copy of a person’s mind still meaningfully human? Does uploaded intelligence, which combines the processing power of a supercomputer with the emotional intelligence of a sentient being, have a competitive edge over cold, unfeeling artificial intelligence? How would uploaded intelligence compromise ethics or geopolitical strategy?

“Underrated” because Pantheon was produced by — and first aired on — AMC+, a streaming service that, owing to the dominance of Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, and Amazon Prime, has but a fraction of its competitors’ subscribers and which, motivated by losses in ad revenue, ended up canceling the show’s highly anticipated (and fully completed) second season in exchange for tax write-offs. Although Pantheon has since been salvaged by Netflix, (…) its troubled distribution history resulted in the show becoming a bit of a hidden gem, rather than the global hit it could have been, had it premiered on a platform with more eyeballs.

Still, the fact that Pantheon managed to endure and build a steadily growing cult following is a testament to the show’s quality and cultural relevance. Although the concept of uploaded intelligence is nothing new, and has been tackled by other prominent sci-fi properties like Black Mirror and Altered Carbon, Pantheon is unique in that it not only explores how this hypothetical technology would affect us on a personal level, but also explores how it might play out on a societal level. Furthermore, Pantheon’s take is a nuanced one, rejecting both techno-pessimism and techno-optimism in favor of what series creator Craig Silverstein calls “techno-realism.”

Uploaded intelligence

The first thing you notice while watching Pantheon is that unlike many other science fiction stories, the show’s writers are actually tech-savvy. Often when we watch a coder or hacker on screen, they spout authoritative but contextually inaccurate programming jargon while smashing wildly at a keyboard. Pantheon’s characters, by contrast, go into considerable depth about the mathematical or computational tasks they deal with, from software engineer Edsger Dijkstra’s dining philosophers problem — a real-world thought experiment concerning synchronization issues in concurrent algorithm design — to what it takes for people who have been uploaded to get used to their new modes of existence.

“The show is based on a series of short stories by Ken Liu,” Silverstein told me, explaining that Liu, “before he became a writer, worked as a software engineer at Microsoft and, later, high-tech litigation consultant. He was in the room with us during the early stages of story development, constantly coming up with scientifically sound ideas. When we were searching for original ways to hack a system, he proposed having one of our characters manipulate the haptics of a phone, making it move by its own vibrations. Story-wise, it just made sense for many characters to be tech-savvy, since they’re in or around the tech industry or connected to someone who is.”

Silverstein’s writing team applied the same level of scientific rigor to the potential of uploaded intelligence (UI). In the show, the first generation of UIs is developed by Logorhythms, a fictional tech company founded by an eccentric, Steve Jobs-inspired futurist called Stephen Holstrom. At first, Logorhythms and its competitors treat their UIs — based on the minds of their most skilled employees — as business assets, activating only the analytical parts of their brains and routinely wiping their memories so they can continue working from the digital afterlife like enslaved algorithms.

Things subsequently take an unexpected term when Logorhythms discovers that they can increase a UI’s productivity by reintegrating others parts of their brains, including those responsible for making emotional connections. At a glance, such practices seem to be little more than a plot device resulting in one of the UIs, a diseased Logorhythms employee named David Kim, breaking into the phones and laptops of his wife and daughter: the inciting incident that kicks the narrative into gear. And yet, this too is based on actual research.

“There was a study done on master chess players,” Silverstein explains. “They hooked them up to all these sensors and found something surprising. They expected the players to use only the analytical parts of their brain, plotting out moves. But they found the emotional centers of the brain were active also, suggesting emotion and intuition play equally significant roles in this otherwise strategic game.” The study confirmed what neuroscientists have long understood: that although our brains are made up of different compartments with different specializations, the brain itself functions as an integrated whole, making use of all of its separate parts.

Techno-realism

Pantheon stands apart from other on-screen representations of artificial and uploaded intelligence insofar as it works from the premise that digitally uploaded minds aren’t less than human, but more. They do, as mentioned, retain the ability to feel. The show’s UIs are not machines with human-like intelligence, but humans with machine-like attributes, capable of accessing every server and smart device in the world, processing exabytes of data in seconds, creating copies of themselves, and hijacking nuclear warheads. They are, as the show’s title suggests, not people, but gods.

“I came up with the title,” Silverstein says, crediting Liu’s short stories, “The Gods Will Not Be Slain” and “The Gods Have Not Died in Vain” for inspiration. “The idea was that uploaded humans, given freedom in open networks, would form the first tier of a new kind of being, a pantheon. Some would collaborate, others would fight, and together they’d create the foundation for future generations.” This vision of the future stands in stark contrast to the idea of the singularity, a concept espoused by other sci-fi writers and tech prophets, in which technological advancement gives rise to a single, all-consuming source of superintelligence that puts an end to individuality and conflict.

Pantheon’s view of the future is less robotic and more human, presenting technology as an extension of human civilization, rather than something superimposed on it. Across history, generations have warned that new technologies would end life as they knew it. And while new technologies have radically transformed life, they have never ended life itself. Instead, they merely broadened its parameters, providing us with new ways to express our humanity. Similarly, uploaded intelligence in Pantheon does not signal the end of human history. Rather, it opens a new chapter. Even when people are reborn in the cloud and freed from death and disease, they continue to struggle with themselves and with each other.

“Technology isn’t separate from us,” Silverstein reiterates, “just as we are not separate from nature, despite what we might think. It’s a natural evolution that stems from us creating technology. Recognizing this is crucial because it means we can take responsibility for it and try to control its impact, rather than resigning ourselves to, ‘Well, who knows what’ll happen?’”

Asked if he leans towards techno-optimism or techno-pessimism, Silverstein replies that he is a “techno-realist,” adding that his expectations for the future are shaped less by the potential of technology itself than his understanding of human nature, which ultimately decides how said technology will be put to use. And while Pantheon does go to dark, dystopian places, the show is ultimately more hopeful than other works of science fiction. In fact, Pantheon’s writers refer to the narrative’s tone as “Rainbow Mirror,” a counterweight to the unceasingly gloomy atmosphere of Black Mirror.

Two characters from Pantheon discuss the dining philosophers problem.

“I’m drawn to stories that don’t simply predict disaster,” Silverstein says, “like AI becoming self-aware and wiping us out. That’s a well-covered trope. Instead, Pantheon explores cohabiting with UIs, and the complexities arising from that coexistence.” 

Unlike the main character of the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back,” for example, in which a woman purchases an algorithm based on her deceased husband’s digital footprint, only to discover that things are not the same, and never will be, the family of Pantheon character David Kim quickly get over the fact that he no longer has a physical body. Even if he’s made up of 1s and 0s instead of organs, he’s still the same person, and that’s what really matters. It’s not unlike how, now that video calls and conferences have become well-established aspects of daily life, we no longer pay attention to the fact that we’re interacting with pixels and soundbites that emulate a human being, rather than the human being itself. At first, new technologies are strange and alien. But they become familiar and accepted over time. Who’s to say that UI — or AI — will be any different?

Of course, that’s not to say UI’s are meaningfully indistinguishable from living, breathing people. “The meaningful difference,” argues Silverstein, “comes down to our lifespan. For humans, our mortality defines so much of our experience. If a human commits murder and receives a life sentence, we understand what that means: a finite number of years. But if a UI with an indefinite lifespan commits murder, what do life sentences mean? Are we talking about a regular human lifespan? 300 years? A thousand? Then there’s love and relationships. Let’s say you find your soulmate and spend a thousand years together. At some point, you may decide you had a good run and move on with someone else. The idea of not growing old with someone feels alien and upsetting. But if we were to live hundreds or thousands of years, our perceptions of relationships and identity may change fundamentally.”

Such new perceptions aren’t fundamentally inhuman; rather, they are the result of humans operating under parameters which, due to our biological limitations, we haven’t (yet) had the opportunity to navigate. But someday, we might.

The gods will not be slain 

Towards the end of Pantheon’s first season, one of the UIs makes the decision to open-source her code, taking the power to upload minds from multi-billion dollar corporations, governments, and high-ranking military personnel, and distributing it among the public.

It’s a fitting end for the show, which continually investigates how technology–and access to technology–can reinforce (or dismantle) preexisting power structures.

“What’s clear,” says Silverstein, “is the importance of having voices asking, ‘How can this work for most people? How can it benefit society and civilization?’ For example, in the second season of Pantheon, we explore ideas like implementing a machine tax. If sweeping automation and AI are going to replace a lot of jobs, there should be mechanisms to ensure society adapts and benefits from these changes.” One way or another, Silverstein observes, “we need to get ahead of this because the pace of change is accelerating so quickly.”

This article was originally published by our sister site, Freethink.