Pantheon and the Techno-Heaven

A dystopia that thinks it offers utopia. A tale as old as time.

Pantheon is a show about uploaded intelligence, and it poses all the right questions while intersecting related themes in interesting ways.

Are people uploaded to a computer really the same person?

What about a 100% genetic clone? Is he the same person or does he have a distinct identity?

What is the end game if the technology for uploaded intelligence were viable?

Can uploaded intelligences have children?

Is the uploaded intelligence the intellectual property of the company that invented the technology?

And many more. The show’s answers are surprising and entertaining, even if half of them are unsatisfactory. It plays it smart by focusing on well-rounded characters, so viewers forgive some of the handwaviness. As entertainment, it’s top-notch.

However, the show isn’t just entertainment. It posits a world that modern technologists and oligarchs desire. An artificial world made in our image, bowing to our every whim. Eternal digital life.

The very name of the show speaks to this conceit. Pantheon.

“And ye shall be as gods.”

The “Mind Virus” of the Biological World

In a recent Vox podcast and article discussing the metaphysical assertions of AI, Jaron Lanier discusses the unusual, faith-based goals of technologists and their reverence for what they are creating.

I talk to the people who believe that stuff all the time, and increasingly, a lot of them believe that it would be good to wipe out people and that the AI future would be a better one and that we should wear a disposable temporary container for the birth of AI.

Just the other day I was at a lunch in Palo Alto and there were some young AI scientists there who were saying that they would never have a “bio baby” because as soon as you have a “bio baby,” you get the “mind virus” of the [biological] world. And when you have the mind virus, you become committed to your human baby. But it’s much more important to be committed to the AI of the future. And so to have human babies is fundamentally unethical.

Elon Musk has said that humans might be the bootloader for the intelligence that matters. The idea of something artificial replacing humanity is something serious and powerful people believe.

The desire to slough off the limitations of the flesh is nothing new. Gnosticism and its denigration of human bodies has been around forever. Even its union with modern science into a form of techno-gnosticsm was something predicted by C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength, published in 1945.

Here is a conversation from the novel among some of the scientists at N.I.C.E.

“If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, ‘Oh the horrid thing. It is alive,’ and then drop it?”

“Go on,” said Winter.

“And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life expect your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath.”

“That’s true.”

“And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms — sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions.”

“What are you driving at, Professor?” said Gould. “After all we are organisms ourselves.”

“I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life…We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course; slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.”

The mind. The mind is what matters. For the mind to live without the body is the ultimate wish for many.

Hell Becomes Heaven

The first season of Pantheon treats uploaded intelligence as unnatural and ugly. The second episode has one of the most disturbing scenes I’ve ever watched. A man unwillingly has his brain burned away and scanned, layer by layer, as you watch the life dim in his eyes.

A nightmare. Who would want this? No one sane. Only the terminally ill would ever volunteer for such a procedure.

Yet, it is soon discovered that these UIs (uploaded intelligences) become superhumanly powerful as they are unleashed on the internet, free from all physical limitations.

Then the show does something clever. It introduces the flaw. The mind was not meant to live without the body, and a mind processing more data at lightspeed than any human brain could fathom begins to decay. To lose itself. If left unchecked, the flaw makes a UI even less than human and certainly less than a god. Shadows that eventually fade.

A large part of the second season is about trying to fix the flaw. Once the flaw is fixed, the nightmare is over. People can now live forever. Hell becomes heaven, even though nothing is real.

Remember The Matrix? The movie where humanity is enslaved by plugging them into a simulation, a prison they must fight to be free from?

For Pantheon and many modern technologists, the Matrix wouldn’t be a prison. A voluntary Matrix is the end goal of the human race.

So the Matrix is good, actually. Cipher, the traitor from the first movie, was correct in his desire to be plugged back in. This view isn’t new, of course, but its grown beyond the contrarians and online edgelords to the founders of real-life companies who have political influence.

He just had to wait another decade or so…

No Grace in a Secular Heaven

One character, Julius Pope, complains in the penultimate episode that he helped build heaven, but he was kept out of it because of a criminal record. If he uploaded himself via the black market, the authorities would figure it out quickly and delete him.

Only the deserving get to be uploaded in this brave new world. Julius has a case of sour grapes and becomes a terrorist. It backfires with beautiful, dramatic irony.

But it’s funny when people who no doubt would complain about the capriciousness of god who dares deny entry to heaven when it’s something we would obviously do ourselves. And we would be vindictive about it. Even if we could somehow create our own paradise, we would find a way to make it exclusive.

The God of the Bible, on the other hand, offers free grace. Everyone is offered eternal life. A real life, not a digital facsimile. All they have to do is bow down and take it, no matter what else they have done. The price has already been paid.

Of course, we will never create our own paradise. We long for the Garden. In our fallen state, we also hate the Garden. We are in love with our own flesh while also despising it and desiring to make it obsolete. Everything becomes sterile and/or tyrannical.

Our would-be paradises always end up requiring the shedding of blood, and Pantheon’s paradise is no different.

A Rushed Infinite Regression

Pantheon was canceled while season 2 was in production. It’s obvious they were counting on at least one more season to tell their story, because the final two episodes are a madcap rush to a conclusion that devolves into an infinite loop.

Simulation theory is explored quickly. What if it’s all digital, all the way down?

The main protagonist becomes a god. Or does she?

The show collapses on itself, which is understandable. Those final two episodes could not bear the weight. The creators at least did something wild and interesting.

It’s a mess. But it’s a beautiful mess.

Pantheon is worth watching because real people, probably people you know, long for the digital over the physical. These ideas have captured their imagination. People want digital life without becoming the blobs from Wall-E.

The show will help you ponder the right questions, even if it can’t help you find the right answers.

8/10