Chanda’s life is on a loop

The world expands and contracts in this episode. We see more of what brought our characters to where they are in the present day, not simply through backstory but also how Pantheon opens up its world to show us more than the small slices of character we had in episodes 1 and 2.

In particular the world building reveals how different research projects are connected and how different corporations are really prowling around the same tech, the same concerns and, even, the same aspirations.

The focus here remains on the personal – on relationships turned upside down by technology. On the one hand we have Maddie and her mother, Ellen, dealing with the discovery that David Kim, Maddie’s father, may not just have died but may also still be present (I hesitate to use the word alive here for reasons that become apparent in watching the show). The show could (and I suspect will) focus on what it means for someone to be nothing more than a digitally mediated intelligence but first the story focuses on the grief, the loss and the emotional consequences of someone who has been mourned coming back to virtual life.

Is intelligence embodied or is it something free floating? These are old philosophical conundrums which, personally, I think have been answered fairly decisively in favour of human intelligence as we recognise it requiring instantiation, but the show here brings these arguments to the screen in a neat and accessible way. There’s also a sneaky insertion of zombies in the background of one scene that smartly references philosophical zombies as first coined by David Chambers when discussing whether something that is indistinguishable from actual intelligence is therefore intelligent or if it could fool us while remaining entirely non-intelligent in its fundamental nature.

Before we go too far down this route and the arguments for and against the existence of p-zombies and their implications, we shall move on. However, I raise it for two reasons. First that the show clearly knows its onions on this subject but second, this tiny piece of world building isn’t trumpeted or even called out – it’s just there in the background.

All of this deep philosophical musing is there in the story and the background but it doesn’t overwhelm the emotional consequences of such lives and it is this which makes the viewing compelling.

Against Maddie’s reconnection with something that could be an authentic version of her father we have the absolute horror show of Caspian’s home life which appears to have come right out of a Twilight Zone episode made real.

We still don’t know what Caspian is being groomed for but it’s clear he’s being groomed for events and uses he doesn’t understand. Those manipulating him regard him as a resource and we get hints that they may have a particularly unpleasant future in mind for him which disastrously comes from the best of intentions. It’s particularly queasy and I’m enthralled.

I suspect the show is going to move past these considerations of embodiment vs. singularity and focus on the implications of having human intelligences freed from the limitations of both physics but also from mortality.

Except the bit no one ever really talks about when they evangelise for the singularity? The cost. Running a datacentre isn’t cheap. Putting humanity into the cloud (which IT people remind me simply means ‘other peoples’ computers’) is neither sustainable for all of us (because who does the repair work and maintenance?) nor energy efficient.

We might like to think that the singularity frees us from physicality but in many ways computer pixels are linked to the physical world just as comprehensively as our flesh and bone bodies – it’s just their fuel is electricity and their bodies are temperature controlled warehouses full of electronics.

I hope we don’t lose this sense of the human scale in what’s to come. Fortunately, given that every religious reference so far has been linked to all too human and capricious gods from pre-industrial history, I suspect we’re going to get humanity full in the face no matter where they’re making their decisions.

Rating? 8 faked arguments out of 10.

Stewart Hotston