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.
