That’s one of the many big questions asked in Pantheon, an animated TV series. In the show, David, a brilliant programmer, comes down with an incurable disease. His company, Logorhythms, has been working on uploading human minds into the cloud, and so David decides to become the first test subject. Miraculously, the experiment succeeds—and a litany of moral questions unravels from there.
If a company manages to digitize a person, do they have the rights to some of that person’s labor? If you could upload yourself at any point in your life to avoid death, would you do it? And when? Is the person inside the web the same as the old one outside, and how can we know for sure? What if cyberspace is more fun than reality, and no one wants to stay back and maintain the necessary hardware? Would we shut down the internet and go back to simpler times? Would we be able to live without it long-term or clamor to get back online? Where will the energy for all this digital activity come from? And would anyone even still have to work? It’s an endless thread once you start pulling, and not even the world’s fastest computer can process it to a definitive conclusion.
Towards the end, the show begins making big time jumps. One year later. Five years later. 20 years later. Eventually, we cut millennia into the future. It’s only a brief glimpse at how these sweeping technological changes compound in the long run, but it’s enough to serve two interesting indications.
First, you never know what humans will do until you put them in a situation where all the options they could want are actually on the table. Ellen, for example, who is David’s wife, is always adamantly against uploading—until, eventually, she decides to join the cloud herself. New goals fuel new possibilities, and new possibilities enable new goals. Asking someone what they would do if everything was possible is not the same as actually making everything possible for them.
The second indication is that humanity will never run out of problems. If we solved death, disease, and despair, we’d find new constraints and start throwing our creativity at them. In the show, the first uploaded people have a flaw in their code. If they can’t fix it, they’ll disintegrate and die a second, digital death on top of their physical one. Once the flaw is fixed, however, where will the uploaded intelligence live and draw the vast resources it needs from? After the show answers that question, it repeats it right away at scale: At some point, yet another form of digital intelligence emerges—300 billion specimens of it. Where will they live if they’re to support the uploaded humans? Construction work on a massive satellite ring begins, but that’s when moral discussions break out. Progress never stops, but it also never stops being thwarted. That’s evolution—and humans are as subject to it as everything else nature has ever wrought.
Be it a book, a TV show, or a philosophical discussion: Every now and then, grapple with the big questions. They’re not better than the small ones. If anything, they show us that our challenges large and tiny are one and the same. We’ll never solve life, so we might as well take our time—and dive into some beautiful stories while we’re at it.
