Inside Pantheon, the Cult Cartoon That’s Blowing Minds in the AI Industry

Last fall, while I was reporting a story on religion and Silicon Valley, I interviewed an engineer who offered an unexpected shortcut to understanding the tech industry’s ultimate AI ambitions: “Watch the TV show Pantheon,” he told me. “Everyone working at the big AI companies watches that show.”

It was the first I’d heard of Pantheon, even though the animated series had premiered nearly two years earlier. When I watched it last fall, season one was easy enough to find on Netflix, but season two had been scattered to the digital wilderness; the only version I could track down was on YouTube. The show is created by Craig Silverstein, a writer and producer who has worked on series like Turn: Washington’s Spies and The Invisible Man. When I reached out to him for an interview earlier this month, he said he was unsurprised that I was late to discovering the show: Originally produced to run on AMC’s subscription streaming service, Pantheon’s debut received virtually zero marketing. Later, the network buried the second season after it had already been produced, according to Silverstein. (Both seasons are now available on Netflix.)

Mainstream audiences may have missed Pantheon, but in Silicon Valley, particularly among people working in AI, it is well on its way to cult status. “I predict pantheon will become a mainstream show like game of thrones or squid game,” wrote James Campbell, a researcher working on artificial general intelligence (AGI) at OpenAI, last December on X. “As our timeline begins to mirror the show, it’ll equip ppl with useful frames for making sense of the world and possibly play a non-trivial role in dissembling anti-AGI sentiment.”

Silicon Valley’s fascination with Pantheon likely stems from its plausible depiction of a nuclear-style global arms race sparked by rival nations developing digital superintelligence simultaneously. It all feels uncomfortably close to how an AI arms race between the US and China might unfold, in which hackers, armed with computer-enhanced minds and access to critical infrastructure, hijack military systems and power grids.

The deeper question lingering over Pantheon’s two seasons is about what it means to be human in an era of digitized sentience. The show’s second season offers a glimpse of the world companies like OpenAI might imagine they’re building: one where humans, freed from their physical form, live like gods. One character predicts that uploaded intelligences, or UIs, will usher in an era of abundance. “This will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution,” he says. “The UIs will transform business, medicine, and construction. Once they’re running things, humans can kick back—all at once, and for good. It’ll create a massive retirement economy for the young, filled with endless markets for new products and services.”

It’s a line that feels like it could be plucked directly from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s latest essay, “The Gentle Singularity,” in which Altman writes that as supercomputing improves in the coming years, the “rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035…. Many people will choose to live their lives in much the same way, but at least some people will probably decide to ‘plug in.’” (An OpenAI spokesperson said that while Altman has not watched the show, he has “heard it’s really good.”)

Earlier this month, I reached out to Silverstein about the show’s avid following in Silicon Valley. Below is our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity:

Vanity Fair: People in Silicon Valley obviously spend a lot of time thinking about the issues dealt with in Pantheon, like immortality, the singularity, and even uploaded consciousness. What kind of research did you do in terms of understanding Silicon Valley’s relationship to uploading human consciousness?

Craig Silverstein: When we were initially researching this, we came across a lot of people who are obsessed with life extension. Ray Kurzweil, for instance. All of these people are trying to defeat death through various means, like cloning or cryogenics. I do not believe they will be successful, by the way. But most stories are about death. There’s a lot of interesting questions about what it means to be human if you remove death.

There’s a brief mention of marriage [between two people who both uploaded their consciousness into the cloud] in the show. If you live for hundreds or thousands of years, what does the concept of a soul mate mean? What’s the concept of crime and punishment if you live to be hundreds of thousands of years old? If you murder someone, do you get deleted or frozen for a certain amount of time? All of the rules we have for ourselves are based on the fact that we’re going to die. These people who think they’re not gonna die…well, sorry, buddy, you’re gonna die! You think you’re going to get uploaded? [Laughs] I do not believe that. I love to speculate about it, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Before we dig into the show and its role in Silicon Valley any further, could you explain the concept of uploaded intelligence as it’s portrayed in Pantheon?

Uploaded intelligence is a technology that’s been speculated about for a while. Ken Liu, who wrote the short story collection Pantheon is based on, has a lot more knowledge about this, and in his estimation, we’re a lot closer to this kind of tech than we might think. Uploaded intelligence is about scanning and creating a full emulation of the human mind. But it’s a destructive scan, which means you absolutely have to destroy the physical brain so that an emulation of that mind lives on in a computer powerful enough to run it [as a piece of software]. People have been speculating about this idea for a long time. “Uploaded intelligence” or “UI” is what we called it in the show. Robin Hanson refers to it in his book The Age of Em—which I read while researching the show—as “the ems” as in “emulated people.”

You adapted Pantheon from Ken Liu’s short story collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. Is the show based on a single story in that collection?

Three of the short stories are in a kind of trilogy, which is where I drew inspiration for the characters, Maddie, and her father, David. There’s a scene where Maddie is talking to someone on the internet who speaks only in emojis. She realizes that the person she’s talking to is actually her dead father, who was a researcher at a big Silicon Valley tech firm. Then the story moves into these WWIII stakes and delves into these different stories about uploaded intelligence. The thing that attracted me to this collection is that they’re all family stories; they come through the lens of family, love, character, and drama, which is what TV is all about. It gave me a way to write about esoteric, hard sci-fi stuff, but through a simple way.

What inspirations did you take from Silicon Valley for the show?

The show was written before the pandemic and before ChatGPT. At the time, the AI stuff was coming, and we were all worried about AI. Everyone was talking about AI, and a lot of the concepts that come up later in the show, like universal basic income and ways to solve an automated world where AI is running everything. So all of that was very much at the forefront of my mind.

I’ve always been very interested in AI, but as a drama writer, I’m very, very suspicious about writing AI as a character, because we’ve seen a million examples of this in movies and TV. AI tends to be this cold, unfeeling entity. Or I’ve also seen it portrayed as a small child or a little girl, and they’re all cliches. There’s an uncanny tone to AI. It’s growing and changing so fast that I actually find it less interesting to write.

But then there’s the idea of a UI—of somebody that was human—and I thought, Oh, I can write that. So we’re pushing off on the idea of AI from there, and the show gets into ASI [artificial super intelligence, the theoretical threshold at which AI supersedes human intelligence]. All that stuff is related to the singularity. The one thing I knew for sure is that I couldn’t write past the singularity. If ASI is supposed to exceed what we can conceive as humans, we shouldn’t be able to write it. So I thought about writing up to essentially the edge of it.

One of the most amazing aspects of the show is the way it envisions the singularity. I was struck by the arc that takes place across the two seasons: In season one, there’s a nightmarish scene in which a character gets uploaded against his will, and I ended that season thinking that uploaded intelligence was horrific. But in season two, there’s this singularity moment where we see how wonderful life could be if we weren’t constrained to a physical body. At that point, I found myself wishing I could be uploaded into the cloud.

That balance between horror and the aspirational potential of the tech is in Ken’s stories as well. It’s a very human approach in which there’s good and bad. I actually told the writing staff: “You know the show Black Mirror? Our tone is ‘Rainbow Mirror.’” I’m interested in both the threat and the utility of the technology. There’s a line that comes up in season two that I do believe in: “I don’t think you can stop the future.”

Pantheon’s vision of the singularity and superintelligence ushering in a world of abundance is very close to the heart of Silicon Valley, including some of the most powerful people currently building AI. Sam Altman writes these really breathless essays about a future in which work is automated and energy is abundant. Do you see any parallels between Pantheon and what’s happening right now in the world of technology?

I think the rate of change seems to be increasing. Or if not increasing, then it’s accounted for, like with Moore’s Law. It can take a second to step back and see how far any technology has come in just this last century compared with the ones that came before. So the idea that the rate of change is going to accelerate is not surprising. I don’t know about uploaded intelligence, but I can see AGI happening really soon. And I’m worried about that. It’s funny, in Pantheon, one of the things that all the characters seem to agree on is that AI is dangerous. They use it, but they’re cautious about it.

Season two makes the compelling case that killing your human body in order to upload to the cloud is actually the moral thing to do because it’s better for the environment. UIs require so much less than human bodies. You can fit a couple thousand UIs on a flash drive, whereas “embodied” humans still require housing, food, and water.

[Laughs] I may have been a little naive about that.

Right, because AI actually uses a tremendous amount of energy.

Yeah, maybe I was wrong about that. But maybe they’ll figure out more energy-efficient solutions in the future.

One criticism I’ve read about the show is that it’s Silicon Valley propaganda because it puts forth this notion that you can achieve immortality and become a god by pursuing technocratic goals. What do you think about that criticism?

I believe that technology, whether we like it or not, is the prime mover of human civilization and society. Social media, the internet…all these things have done more to change the way we live our lives than nations and policies. I don’t think that that’s necessarily a good thing, by the way. I just think it’s true. Silicon Valley is incredibly influential. I also don’t think that’s necessarily good. I really am concerned about that, because they are human beings.

The people in Silicon Valley?

Yeah. I’m very suspect of them. And if you look at my examples of powerful people in the show in Silicon Valley, like Stephen Holstrom, I don’t think they’re portrayed as particularly great people.

Last question: If you were living in Pantheon’s season two vision of the singularity, would you upload your consciousness into the cloud?

If more than half the people that I know and love had, and I was able to ask them questions about it, and get an assurance about it, and if I had the option to have autonomy over my own death, then I might consider it. But I definitely would not be one of the first, that’s for sure.