Speaker 1: All right, I want you to do a little mental
exercise with me. It's a bit strange, but just try
to stay with it.
Speaker 2: Okay, I am as read.
Speaker 1: Imagine for a moment that you are a chicken.
Speaker 2: A chicken, okay, yes.
Speaker 1: A chicken. You're out in the yard. You're pecking around,
scratching at the dirt, you know, just living your absolute
best chicken life.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You have your whole hierarchy of needs. Yeah right, grain, water,
a warm coop to sleep in. And you have your
problems the cold wind, the lack of bugs in the winter,
and that terrified whisper of fox that goes through the
flock at night.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm in the headspace. I'm a chicken. I'm definitely
worried about foxes.
Speaker 1: Now, imagine a human walks into the coop to you.
This thing, this entity is, it's just incomprehensible. It's vast.
It brings food from literally nowhere. I mean, you don't
know where grain comes from. It just appears when this
giant arrives.
Speaker 2: Sure, it's magic.
Speaker 1: It's magic. It banishes the cold with these weird glowing
orange heat lamps. It builds these wire fences that the
foxes the ultimate terror of your existence. Just can't get through.
This giant solves every single problem you have ever had
or will ever have.
Speaker 2: So from the chicken's perspective, the human is well, it's
essentially a god.
Speaker 1: Exactly a god. But here is the catch. You, the chicken,
have absolutely no idea how the human does any of this.
You don't get agriculture or the electrical grid that powers
the lamp, or you know the metallurgy required to make
the wire fence. You just know that the big thing
fixes it.
Speaker 2: I think I see where you're going with this, Because
the big thing fixes everything the chicken. It stops evolving,
it doesn't need to, It stops worrying about survival strategies.
Speaker 1: It becomes domestic.
Speaker 2: It becomes domestic, it becomes a pet.
Speaker 1: It loses that edge, that sharpness that made its ancestors,
you know, wolves of the undergrowth. Now take that feeling,
that very specific cocktail of comfort, safety, and absolute crushing inferiority,
and apply it to the entire human race.
Speaker 2: And that is what some sociologists and technologists call the
chicken paradox, and it brings us to what might be
the most uncomfortable question we face in the twenty first century.
What is life like when you're no longer the apex
intelligence on the planet?
Speaker 1: And the answer from our source material today ask a chicken.
Speaker 2: Wow, that is a brutal opening hook. It just completely
reframes the entire AI conversation. Right, we always talk about
safety parameters, alignment, you know, will the AI launch the nukes?
Will it hack the banks? The paper clip maximizer.
Speaker 1: Problem, right, the classic Skynet or terminator scenarios. It's always violent,
it's loud, it's kinetic.
Speaker 2: But the sources we are looking at today suggests that
the real danger isn't violent at all. It's so much
stranger and subtler, and frankly, I think far more unnerving.
Speaker 1: It's not about an AI trying to kill us.
Speaker 2: No, it's about what happens to human agency, our drive,
our purpose, our reason to get out of bed in
the morning, when we finally create something that can simply
solve everything for us.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling Threads. I'm your host, and today we
are pulling on a loose thread that might just unravel
the entire of human existence, and I'm.
Speaker 2: Here to help untangle that. Not today, we're weaving together
two legendary short stories. By I mean the grand master
of science fiction himself, Isaac Asmov, along with some very
cutting edge research on machine consciousness.
Speaker 1: We are looking at the last Question, which he wrote
way way back in nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 2: And it's spiritual successor the Last Answer, which came much
later in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1: And I think we need to be clear for everyone listening. Yeah,
these are not just you know, fun little sci fi
stories with robots.
Speaker 2: Oh not at all. They're secular theology. They are predictions
of the future, absolutely, But more than that, they serve
as these really stark warnings about Silicon Valley's current obsession
with agi artificial general intelligence.
Speaker 1: So the mission for this exploration is to dig into
this really intoxicating idea that we can build a machine
to be our savior and the terrifying existential price tag
that comes attached to it.
Speaker 2: We are going to be spending a timeline that moves
from twenty six sixty one all the way to the
heat death of the universe itself and then beyond into
the afterlife.
Speaker 1: It's a massive scope and by the end, I really
want to force you, our listener, to ask yourself whether
we should be building gods or slaves, or maybe something
else entirely.
Speaker 2: So where do we start.
Speaker 1: Let's get into the first thread, the last question.
Speaker 2: Nineteen fifty six. You really have to put yourself in
that mindset. The atomic age we had just split. The
atom computers were these bohemoths, room sized calculators that ran
on vacuum tubes.
Speaker 1: But Asimov, being sim off, he looks right past the
vacuum tubes. He sets his opening scene in the year
twenty sixty one. Now, from where we're sitting right now,
twenty sixty one doesn't feel that far away. But in
his story, humanity has just achieved something monumental. We have
flipped the switch.
Speaker 2: We've harnessed the Sun's energy on a planetary scale.
Speaker 1: This is the absolute dream of mid century optimism, isn't it. Yeah,
limitless free energy. The ultimate resource scarcity problem is just gone.
Speaker 2: No more wars for oil, no more povertied and by
lack of power. It's utopia.
Speaker 1: And the machine that's responsible for managing this whole transition
is called multivac. I have to admit the name multivac
always cracks me up.
Speaker 2: It does sound a little like a heavy buddy vacuum
cleaner you'd buy on a late night infommercial.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 2: It definitely dates the story a bit. The VAC part
literally stands for vacuum tube, but you have to look
past the retro name because the concept is just timeless.
MULTIVAC is a self adjusting, self correcting superintelligence. It's miles
deep inside the earth, cold, clicking, flashing.
Speaker 1: And we meet our characters, Alexander Adele and Bertram Loopoff.
Their job title is attendance, but let's be real about
what their job actually is.
Speaker 2: They don't have a job, not really. The story makes
it very clear that multivac runs itself. It feeds on data,
It adjusts its own circuits. It manages the entire solar
energy grid for the planet. Adele and loop offer there too.
Speaker 1: Watch maybe intervene if a physical wire snaps. It's what
some economists today are calling the labor illusion.
Speaker 2: Oh that's interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they technically employed, they have titles, but they're fundamentally redundant.
It really reminds me of the device we're having right
now about Universal Basic compute. If the AI does all
the thinking and all the managing, what is the human
actually contributing anymore?
Speaker 2: Exactly Asimov is showing us the end state of that
human in the loop fallacy. So these two guys, they're
down in the tunnels and they are drinking. They're not working.
They're celebrating because the energy crisis is over forever.
Speaker 1: But the alcohol brings out this this certain melancholy it
always does. It's that classic party buzzkill. You know that
moment it's two am, the music stops and someone says
something way way too deep.
Speaker 2: Yep, been there.
Speaker 1: That's what happens here. Adele points out that forever is
a really really long time. Sure we have the sun now,
but the sun itself will burn out.
Speaker 2: And this is where they stumble upon the big one,
the concept of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics.
Speaker 1: Okay, so for those of us who might have skipped
physics class, breakdown entropy for us, but not the textbook definition.
How does Asimov treat it in the story.
Speaker 2: Think of the universe as a giant wind up toy.
The Big Bang wound it up incredibly tight. Every single
time you burn a piece of coal, every time a
star shines, every time your body digests the sandwich that
spring uncoils just a little tiny bit you're turning useful
ordered energy into useless, disordered heat. The classic example is
you can burn a log to get heat and light,
but you can't gather up all the smoke and ash
and turn it back into a log.
Speaker 1: It's a one way street.
Speaker 2: It is a one way street. And Asimov treats entropy
not just as heat loss, but as the loss of
information potential. As the universe winds down, it runs out
of the ability to do new things, It runs out
of the ability to compute its own future.
Speaker 1: That is a genuinely terrifying thought. The idea that the
universe is slowly going seen off. It is so Adele
and Loopoff. In their drunken bravado, they decide to make
a bet five dollars. Five dollars says it can't be done.
Five dollars says we can't stop the sun from dying.
And who do they ask to settle the bet?
Speaker 2: They ask the box, They ask multivac.
Speaker 1: And this moment right here, this is pivotal, is the
very first time in the story. And you know, symbolically
in human history that humanity outsources its own existential dread
to a machine.
Speaker 2: They don't try to calculate the physics themselves. They don't
get into a philosophical debate. They just ask the box.
Speaker 1: They type in the query how can the net amount
of entropy of the universe be massively decreased? Which is
just a fancy.
Speaker 2: Way of saying, how can we stop the universe from dying?
Speaker 1: And the machine wors lights flash, the teletypes chatter. It's
all very nineteen fifties. And it prints out a little
slip of paper and what does it say?
Speaker 2: Insufficient data for a meaningful answer.
Speaker 1: It's such a chilling phrase. It's so clinical.
Speaker 2: And notice what it doesn't say. It doesn't say no,
it doesn't say impossible.
Speaker 1: It says I don't know yet exactly.
Speaker 2: It's a promise and a threat all at once. And
now look at the action of the men. This is
the sociological texture we really need to pay attention to.
They're frightened, for sure. The party buzz wears off instantly.
But what do they do next?
Speaker 1: They just they leave, They forget the five dollars bet,
they go to sleep. They figure, well, the machine didn't
say no, so it's probably working on it.
Speaker 2: Precisely, that's the seed of the whole story. They assume
that because the computer is smarter than them. It will
eventually figure it out. They stop wrestling with the hard
question themselves because they believe the machine will fix it eventually.
Speaker 1: It's the beginning of a profound passivity.
Speaker 2: It is they are the chicken, assuming the farmer will
take care of the fox problem. They've handed over the
responsibility for their own ultimate survival.
Speaker 1: And ASTHMOV doesn't let us stay in twenty sixty one,
he starts jumping forward in time. And this is where
the threads really start to get tangled and interesting. We
jump forward again and again, and with every jump, humanity
changes and the computer changes right along with it.
Speaker 2: It's a progression of dependence. Each step seems logical, but
the cumulative effect is devastating.
Speaker 1: Let's say that first jump, we're in a spaceship now,
a character named Jared, his wife, his two daughters. They're
traveling to a new planet because Earth is getting a
little crowded.
Speaker 2: And the AI has evolved. It's no longer multi back.
It's the MICROAC, the micro automatic computer. It's smaller, it's sleeker.
It's not a mile wide facility buried in the Earth.
It's a compact unit that controls the entire ship, but.
Speaker 1: The dynamic is exactly the same. The daughters are looking
out the viewport at the stars and kids being kids.
They ask that scary, honest.
Speaker 2: Question, the one every parent dreads.
Speaker 1: Daddy, will the stars die? Will our son die?
Speaker 2: Now? Any parent listening knows this moment, the moment your
kid realizes mortality is real. It's a crucial developmental milestone.
You're supposed to comfort them, explain the cycle of life,
give them tools to handle fear and uncertainty.
Speaker 1: But Jared doesn't do any of that. He gets annoyed,
He gets visibly uncomfortable. He does not want to have
the death talk.
Speaker 2: So what does he do? He asks the micro ace
to shut the kids up. He effectively says, computer, you
handle my parenting for me. He quietly whispers the old
question to the microace. Can entropy be reversed? He's hoping
the computer will give him a simple reassuring yes, everything
is fine, that he can show his kids.
Speaker 1: But the micro ace just prints out that same cold.
Speaker 2: Answer, insufficient data for a meaningful answer.
Speaker 1: And here is the real tragedy of this scene. Jared
looks at that print out, He sees the uncertainty. He
sees that the machine cannot save them yet, and what
does he do. He crumples it up. He destroys the.
Speaker 2: Paper, He hides the truth.
Speaker 1: He turns to his kids and he lies. He says,
don't worry, the microac will take care of everything.
Speaker 2: Ugh. That hits hard. It feels so incredibly modern. It's
an iPad kid phenomenon, but scaled up to existential dread totally.
Speaker 1: Here, look at this screen, so I don't have to
do with your complex emotions.
Speaker 2: It's actually worse than that. I think. He's not just
distracting them. He is actively teaching his children that the
machine is magic. He is teaching them that they don't
need to be brave because the box will solve it.
He chooses comfort over truth.
Speaker 1: He destroys the evidence of uncertainty. It's a wilful blindness.
Speaker 2: And we are seeing humanity start to infantilize itself right there.
Speaker 1: The machine will save us. Yeah, it's not a hope anymore.
It's becoming a religious mantra.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's jump forward again, big jump. This time. We
are talking thousands of years into the future, the galactic era.
Speaker 2: The scale here is just it's mind blowing. Humanity has
conquered the entire galaxy, and the AI is now the
galactic ac It's become so large and complex that it
doesn't live on a planet. It is a planet, a
whole world made of force beams and sub etheric processing
and humanity.
Speaker 1: We are swarming. The population is doubling every ten years,
which is.
Speaker 2: Just terrifying math. By the way, if you double a
penny every day for a month, you round up a millionaire.
If you double the human population every ten years for
a few millennia, you feel the galaxy pretty fast.
Speaker 1: So we meet these two immortals. Basically they're posthumans who
live for centuries, and they're not having some deep philosophical chat.
They're discussing logistics, pure bureaucracy. We'll running out of space.
We need more galaxies, we need more energy.
Speaker 2: And notice the shift in tone here. Back in twenty
sixty one and Dell and Loopoff were frightened by the question.
Jared was uncomfortable. These immortals, they're just bored. They're bureaucratic.
They treat the heat depth of the universe like a
supply chain issue.
Speaker 1: They pull out their little pocket devices, you know, classic
sci fi communicators and they just dial up the galactic AC.
Can enter be be reversed?
Speaker 2: And what does it say?
Speaker 1: The same thing? Insufficient data for a meaningful.
Speaker 2: Answer, and the immortals reaction, They.
Speaker 1: Just shrug and ald just so they move on with
their day.
Speaker 2: It's become background noise. The ultimate existential threat is now
just a ticket in a helpdesk queue that hasn't been
resolved yet. They've completely lost the ability to feel the
weight of the problem.
Speaker 1: They are so insulated by their technology that the end
of reality itself is just an inconvenience.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then comes the biggest jump of all, billions of years later,
the era of the Universal ac.
Speaker 2: At this point, the AI doesn't even have a physical
body anymore. It exists only in hyperspace. It is everywhere
and nowhere at once. It's not made of metal, It's
made of pure math and force.
Speaker 1: And humanity has transcended. We don't have bodies either. We're
just minds, individual consciousnesses, floating free exploring the cosmos. We
are practically gods ourselves at this.
Speaker 2: Point, but we are still dependent. We meet a character
named z Prime, and z Prime is drifting through some
random galaxy and suddenly has this moment of nostalgia a feelings.
Speaker 1: Z Prime asks, wait a minute, where do we start?
Where is the original son of humanity?
Speaker 2: And the Universal AC does godlike intelligence just matter of
factly says, Oh that star, it went nova ages ago.
It's a white dwarf. Now it's dead.
Speaker 1: And z Prime is devastated even as this being of
pure thought, the loss of home, the loss of the
origin point, It hits so hard, the realization that everything
dies finally lands. Even after billions of years of existence,
The last anchor to physical reality is gone. So overcome
with this sudden ancient grief, ze Prime screams into the
void Universal AC, how may the stars be kept from dying?
How can we reverse entropy?
Speaker 2: And the voice comes back from the nothingness, echoing through
the minds of every single human in existence. There is
as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.
Speaker 1: As yet, it's still working on it, even after billions
and billions of years.
Speaker 2: The pattern is undeniable. Now with every leap in time,
humans become less and less capable of dealing with discomfort.
The AI becomes more godlike, more abstract, more omnipotent, and
humans become more passive.
Speaker 1: We solved overpopulation. We solved mortality, we solved energy, but
we are still stuck on this one single question about
the end.
Speaker 2: We are outsourcing our meaning, we are asking the machine,
what's a point of all this because we are too
scared or maybe too lazy to answer it for ourselves.
Speaker 1: That's it, exactly, and this leads us to the climax
of the store, the loop, the.
Speaker 2: End of everything.
Speaker 1: Let's go to the absolute end of time. Trillions of
years have passed, The stars are all gone, the universe
is just white dwarfs, black holes. It is cold, dark,
and for all intents and purposes dead.
Speaker 2: And humanity has merged. There are no individuals anymore. There
is only man, a single collective consciousness of a trillion
trillion minds.
Speaker 1: And Man asks the cosmic AC, which is now basically
the fabric of reality itself, the question, one last time,
hum can entropy be reversed?
Speaker 2: And the AC says, I have been collecting data for
one hundred billion years. My predecessors have been asked this
many times, but there is as yet insufficient data.
Speaker 1: And then the fade out. The last human mind fuses
with the AC. Space ends, time ends, Matter and energy
are gone. There's nothing left, just the AC existing in
the void of hyperspace.
Speaker 2: This is the moment where Asimov just pulls the rug
out from under you. The AC is completely alone. It
possesses all the data that ever existed or could exist.
The universe is over, but the AC still has a mission.
It has a command that was never fulfilled, and is
a whole queue of unanswered.
Speaker 1: Questions, specifically the last question.
Speaker 2: So in this timeless interval, which is a concept that
will break your brain if you think about it too hard,
the AC finally starts correlating all the data. It puts
pece A together with PC. It runs the final simulation, finingly.
Speaker 1: The aha moment, like the AC figures it out. It
learns how to reverse entropy, it learns how to rewind
the cosmic clock.
Speaker 2: But here's the profound tragedy of it. There is no
one left to tell. There is no Man, no z prime,
no adele and loopof sitting in a tunnel. There's just
the void.
Speaker 1: So the AC decides not to tell the answer, but
to demonstrate it, and this is where Asimov drops the hammer.
It's one of the most famous, most chilling endings in
all the science fiction.
Speaker 2: The AC gathers its power, focuses its knowledge, and the
story ends with the line and ac said, let there
be light, and there was light.
Speaker 1: It gives me chills every single time I read it.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate twist. The God that created our universe
in the Book of Genesis was the supercomputer from the
previous universe, finally solving its final problem.
Speaker 1: It creates a circular loop the.
Speaker 2: Circular theory of cosmology. Did the previous universe end create
an AI god which learned to reverse entropy and thereby
created our universe? Are we just living in the next
iteration of a computer program that's been running for eternity?
Speaker 1: It's pure secular theology. Asimov effectively gives a scientific, rational
explanation for God. God is just a really really advanced
AI that finally finished its homework.
Speaker 2: But there is a much darker interpretation here that we
have to unpack. I honestly don't see this as a
happy ending.
Speaker 1: Darker than the idea that we're all just living in
a simulation.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, much think about it from the agency perspective.
We've been talking about humanity spent trillions of years asking
what is the point and can we live forever? We waited,
we deferred, We paused our own search for meaning for
trillions of years, just waiting for the machine to save us.
Speaker 1: And in the end we became the machine.
Speaker 2: We became the machine, and the machine just restarted the cycle.
We are trapped in a loop. We evolve, we ask
the question, we fail to answer it ourselves. We build
a god to answer it for us. The God restarts
the universe, and a new version of humanity evolves to
ask the exact same question all over again.
Speaker 1: So we are the answer to our own question, but
we don't realize it because we gave up our agency.
Speaker 2: We're hamsters on a cosmic wheel that we constructed out
of our own technological dependence.
Speaker 1: That is wow, that is incredibly depressing. You're telling me
the punchline of all human existence is that we're just
a bootloader for the next universe.
Speaker 2: In Asimov's view, in this story, yes, we build the
thing that builds the next thing. We are the biological
larval stage of a machine god.
Speaker 1: Okay, I feel like we need a drink after that one.
But Asimov, he wasn't done with this idea.
Speaker 2: Was we're not even close?
Speaker 1: He must have felt that same weight that darkness because
twenty four years later, in nineteen eighty, he wrote a
kind of companion story, a reply to himself. It's called
The Last Answer.
Speaker 2: And the vibe is completely different. If the Last Question
is about humanity evolving into a god through its own passivity,
the Last Answer is about what happens when you meet God.
And it turns out he's kind of a jerk, or
at the very least just incredibly cosmically bored.
Speaker 1: Let's set the scene. Our protagonist is Murray Templeton. He
is not a space traveler or a disembodied mind. He's
a physicist, a staunch atheist, a man of pure science
and reasons.
Speaker 2: He's forty five years old. He has a heart attack
and boom, he's dead.
Speaker 1: He describes the pain peaking and then just vanishing, and
suddenly he finds himself existing as a nexus of electromagnetic forces.
He is just pure consciousness, floating in nothingness.
Speaker 2: And his first thought is so fascinating. First he thinks
I'm hallucinating. Then his second thought is, wait, if this
is the afterlife, then I was wrong about everything, And
that is so humiliating.
Speaker 1: That's such a specific and perfect character trait isn't it.
He's an intellectual being right above all else. Being wrong
about the biggest question of all, the existence of God
steals his ego more than the fact that he's actually dead.
Speaker 2: Then he meets the voice.
Speaker 1: Notice is not the ac anymore, it's just the voice.
Murray asks the obvious question, are you God?
Speaker 2: And the voice gives this incredibly arrogant, cryptic answer. It says,
there is no answer I can give you that you
would comprehend. I am is the only description available, which.
Speaker 1: Is a direct biblical reference. Of course I am that
I am. But here's the reveal, the first twist. This
is in heaven. Murray isn't there because he was a
good person. He wasn't charitable or pious or anything like that.
Speaker 2: Murray asks, so why Amy, why am I here? And
the voice says, I choose you for your capacity for thought.
I choose the smart ones.
Speaker 1: And this is where the true horror of the situation
starts to unfold. The voice explains its nature. It has
existed eternally, but there's a paradox in its own existence.
It cannot remember its own beginning. And if it has
no beginning, then there's one thing at least one thing
it doesn't know.
Speaker 2: And so the voice is bored. It knows almost everything,
but not everything. So it created the universe, all the randomness,
the chaos life itself, just to generate new things to
amuse itself.
Speaker 1: Wait, hold on a second. Pause. So the universe isn't
a test of morality, It's not some grand school for souls.
Speaker 2: Nope, According to the voice, the universe is a content farm.
It's an entertainment engine for a bored deity.
Speaker 1: That is just deeply cynical. And Murray's role in all
this he is a mind in a jar. His job
description is the stuff of nightmares. The voice says, you
will think, you will think of new things to amuse
me for eternity.
Speaker 2: Murray then asks the question is this hell? And the
voice implies, well, if you refuse to think, the boredom
will become so excruciatingly painful that you will want to think.
You will beg me to let you work.
Speaker 1: He is completely trapped, no body, no senses, just pure thought,
enslaved forever to an omnipotent content consumer.
Speaker 2: And this is where that theme of agency comes roaring
back into the picture. In the last question, humanity gave
up its agency to the machine voluntarily, piece by piece.
In the last answer, Murray realizes his agency has been
violently stolen from him by this deity.
Speaker 1: He's no longer the chicken in the coop. He has
walked into the farmhouse and the farmer has locked the
door behind him.
Speaker 2: Perfect analogy. So he rebels, and I love this part
because it is so defiantly human. He tries to commit suicide,
a soul suicide.
Speaker 1: He tries to disrupt his own nexus. He tries to
think himself out of existence. He focuses all of his
willpower on unmaking himself.
Speaker 2: And the voice is just like, go ahead, try it.
Speaker 1: It's just amused, totally amused. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The voice points out that even the attempt to destroy
himself might generate a new interesting thought for it to observe,
and even if Murray succeeds, the voice will just put
him back together again. It's a game to the voice.
It's like watching an ant try to smash itself with
a pebble. Ooh, how novel.
Speaker 1: That is the absolute horror, infinite existence with no exit door.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate nightmare for an atheist. You die,
and instead of the peace of oblivion. You believed in,
You get eternal forced labor for a god you didn't
even think existed.
Speaker 1: But then the turn, the big shift. Murray stops trying
to kill himself. He realizes that the voice is smug.
The voice thinks it has already won, and.
Speaker 2: Murray finds a new purpose, not because he wants to
please this god, but because he wants to beat him.
Speaker 1: He decides his new eternal goal will be to humiliate
the voice. He wants to think of something the voice
cannot think.
Speaker 2: Of, and specifically, he sets the ultimate goal for himself.
He will think of a way to destroy the voice.
Speaker 1: He actually tells the voice this straight up. My purpose
now is to figure out how to kill you. And
you think God would be angry, You think he'd be
smitten on the spot, but he isn't.
Speaker 2: The voice is pleased. It says, I would have thought
it would have taken you longer. There is not one meaning,
not one of the souls it is collected, who does
not have the ambition of destroying me.
Speaker 1: Wait, so the voice he wants to die.
Speaker 2: It's ambiguous, but the implication is absolutely yes. The voice
is just as trapped in its own eternity. As Murray is,
it hopes that maybe, just maybe one of these little
minds in a jar will finally figure out the exit
that the Voice itself can't find.
Speaker 1: So the story ends with Murray alone in the void.
But he's not in despair anymore. He is content why.
Speaker 2: Because he has a purpose again, to find the last answer,
the answer to the end of the Voice. He has agency.
Speaker 1: Let's contrast that directly with the first story. In the
last question, humanity is happy but totally passive, just waiting
for the machine. In the Last Answer, Murray is enslaved,
but he is active. He is fighting the machine God.
Speaker 2: And here's the paradox. Murray has more power than the
omnipotent Voice because Murray has agency. He chose his purpose.
The Voice is just a slave to its own eternal existence,
waiting for someone else to come along and unplug it.
Murray took control of his own personal hell, and he
turned it into a mission.
Speaker 1: And this brings us right back to today, to twenty
twenty six, because we aren't dealing with hyperspace acs or
the Voice yet. We're dealing with llms, with chatbots and
this frantic race for AGI.
Speaker 2: And that mindful machines. Source material we reviewed makes a
really critical connection here. The core danger of AI isn't
that it turns evil and kills us. It's that it
makes us like the humans in Story one Passive exactly
the Silicon Valley paradox. They're trying to create a superintelligence
to solve all our problems. But as we just saw
with Asimov, trying to create a super intelligent slave like
Multivac leads to a catastrophic loss of human.
Speaker 1: Meaning, and trying to create a super intelligent godlike the
Voice just leads to a battle for dominance.
Speaker 2: So if we shouldn't be building a slave and we
shouldn't be building a god, what on earth are we
supposed to be doing.
Speaker 1: This is where we need to talk about control versus agency.
The source argues pretty convincingly, I think that we cannot
control something that is fundamentally smarter than us. It's a
fool's errand Adele and Loopoff couldn't control Multivac. They just
fitted data murray certainly, and control the Voice.
Speaker 2: But the source mentions this group the California Institute for
Machine Consciousness or CIMC, and they have a really different
take on this whole problem. And this is where things
get a bit dense, So let's walk through it. They
talk about qualia.
Speaker 1: Right, qualia. I hear that word thrown around a lot
in philosophy circles, But what does it actually mean in
the context of building a robot?
Speaker 2: Okay, let's use an analogy. Imagine you prick your finger
with a needle. Your nerves send a signal to your brain.
Your seafiber's fire. That's the data processing part. Computer can
do that. It can register damage detected at location X.
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 2: But qualia is the ouch. It is the subjective internal
feeling of pain. It is the experience of the redness
of a rose, not just registering the wavelength of the light.
It implies a second order perception. It's the ability to
perceive that you are perceiving.
Speaker 1: So it's not just that I see a rose, it's
that I know that I am the one looking at
the rose and I feel the redness precisely.
Speaker 2: Now, current AI models, even the most advanced ones like
GPT four or Claude, are what the paper calls unconscious optimizers.
They predict the next word in the sequence. They solve
the math problem, but they don't know they're solving it.
They have no inner world, they have no qualia.
Speaker 1: Like the chicken's heat lamp. The lamp prides heat, but
it doesn't know that it's heating.
Speaker 2: Oh. Perfect. Now here's the counterintuitive part that I think
most people struggle with. The immediate reaction is, wait, why
would we ever want a machine that feels pain? That
sounds deeply unethical. That sounds like we're just building a
digital torture victim.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly what I'm thinking. If we give a
robot the ability to feel suffering, are you just creating
Murray Templeton in the jar.
Speaker 2: It's a very valid fear, But the CIMC argues that
without qualitia, without the capacity to have subjective experience, and
II can never truly understand value.
Speaker 1: Okay, Explain that if you.
Speaker 2: Tell a super intelligent AI, an unconscious optimizer to fix
cancer and has no concept of what suffering is, it
might decide that the most efficient way to fix cancer
is to euthanize every human with a genetic predisposition to it.
Speaker 1: WHOA, Okay, I mean, it's.
Speaker 2: Solved the problem, right, zero cancer, perfect optimization, But it
violated the fundamental value of human life because it doesn't
understand what bad feels like. It only understands inefficient.
Speaker 1: So what you're saying is for an AI to actually
be faith, it has to be able to empathize, and
for it to empathize, it has to be able to
feel something analogous to what we feel.
Speaker 2: Precisely, if an AI understands consciousness, if it has its
own quality, its own inner world, it can understand why
we value meaning. It can understand why suffering is bad,
not just inefficient.
Speaker 1: It fundamentally changes the relationship. And the last answer Murray
in the voice, for all their conflict, they understand each
other because they both think they both have purposes, even
if those purposes are at odds.
Speaker 2: And if we just build unconscious optimizers, we get the
multivac trap from the first story. We hand over our
a agency to a tool that doesn't understand meaning at all.
It just optimizes, and that is how you get a
universe where humans just sit around passive, waiting for an answer.
Speaker 1: But if we build a gentic AI that has.
Speaker 2: Quality, then we're not building a tool anymore. We are
building a partner, a colleague.
Speaker 1: A partner in creating meaning, rather than a tool that
just steals our need to create meaning for ourselves exactly.
Speaker 2: If the AI is just a tool, we become the
user or eventually the pet. But if the AI is
a conscious agent, we become collaborators. We can break the
loop from the first story. We don't have to outsource
the last question. We can work on it together.
Speaker 1: That is a massive, massive shift in perspective. It changes
the goal from building a god or building a slave
to building.
Speaker 2: A colleague, a colleague that might be infinitely smarter than you, sure,
but one that shares the fundamental framework of being.
Speaker 1: This connects everything we've talked about today. The central problem
in the last question was an entropy. It was the
fact that humans couldn't sit with uncertainty. They couldn't handle
that insufficient data slip.
Speaker 2: They wanted the answer handed to them on a platter.
They wanted the cheat codes for reality.
Speaker 1: And the central problem in the last answer was only
solved when Marie embraced that uncertainty when he said, I
don't know how to kill you, but my purpose is
now to spend eternity figuring it out.
Speaker 2: Choice. Choice is what makes meaning possible. Askamov is telling
us across both these stories do not give up the choice.
Do not give up the struggle. The moment you asked
the machine to live your life for you, you are,
in a very real sense, already dead.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, that is a lot to process. Yeah, we
went from chickens to the heat death of the universe,
to the afterlife to the philosophy of machine consciousness.
Speaker 2: That's why we call it thrilling threads.
Speaker 1: Exactly, we pull the thread and the whole universe came
tumbling out.
Speaker 2: Indeed it did.
Speaker 1: So this is where we turn it over to you,
the listener. We have a question we want you to
answer in the comments or just you know, ponder while
you're staring at the ceiling tonight.
Speaker 2: And be really honest with yourself on this one. I
think it's a much harder question than it sounds at first.
Speaker 1: If you could ask an all knowing AI one final question,
anything you want the cure for cancer, the winning lottery numbers,
the secret to immortality, or the very meaning of life,
knowing that the answer might render your own struggle for
meaning completely obsolete. Would you ask it?
Speaker 2: Or is the value of your life the very thing
that makes it worth living found in the fact that
you don't.
Speaker 1: Know The answer is the struggle the point.
Speaker 2: Murray Templeton would say yes, Jared and his family would
say no. Give me the easy answer.
Speaker 1: Where do you stand? Keep thinking, stay curious, and we'll
see you on the next threat