At the time of this writing, the prevailing thinking with "artificial intelligence" was that we'd encode every Fact we know and every rule of Logic, and from there, the computer would make new discoveries. Todays AI researchers would call this "symbolic" AI, compared to the "neural" AI powering LLMs. They're like two different worlds.
LLMs are just generating text, they don't know anything. They can't assess whether there is enough data for an answer. When you add a follow up prompt "This is wrong, why did you lie?" only then is it able to generate text, "I was wrong, I'm sorry," and so forth.
Did Asimov’s idea of AI revolve around data retrieval? I’ve read that even human intelligence isn’t necessarily remembering things, but being able to traverse our knowledge and find that idea or thought quickly.
Living in South America a bit really showed me this. I think it's a cultural thing here but someone will always give you an answer, even if it's wrong, confidently. It was hard for me at first- I am usually the first person to say "I don't know" (often followed by "but let's slow down and find a good solution").
This was similar to my experience running a software team in India (I'm an American) a couple decades ago. I had to learn not to ask yes/no questions because the answer would always be yes.
Talking about South America as a homogeneous unit is… weird. Even neighbouring countries speaking the same language can be entirely different in this regard.
I agree (and I don't normally generalize like this, so I apologize). I've spent most of my time in Peru but noticed it in neighboring countries as well.
That also is my perception, from Brazil. There is even the concept of "cordial man", coined by sociologist Sergio Buarque d Holanda, that is connected to this
I've been trying to work on a new LLM code editor that does just that. When you instruct it to do something, it will evaluate your request, try to analyze the action part of it, the object, subject, etc, and map them to existing symbols in your codebase or, to expected to be created symbols. If all maps, it proceeds. If the map is incomplete, it errors out stating that your statement contained unresolvable ambiguity
I think there is a real benefit here, and it might be the actual next beneficial grounded AI sustainable use in programming. Since I the current "Claude code and friends" are but a state of drunkenness we fell into after the advent of this new technology, but it will prove, with time, that this is not a sustainable approach
They can do it, it's just not "by default", they need to be prompted to do it. So at least the danger is manageable if you know what you're doing and how to prompt around it.
"Just don't accidentally forget to do the thing that makes it safe" is not a very effective strategy for something that so many vested interests are trying to push into all corners of society. If it's so easy to misuse it, then it shouldn't be used in any context outside of where there are no major consequences for bad output and there's amble opportunity and ability to validate it
Not really. They're still non deterministic language predictors. Believing that a prompt is an effective way to actually control these machines' actual behavior is really far fetched.
They com like that from factory. Hardcoded to never say no.
They're not hardcoded to never say no, but some of the models were trained to be "yes men" because their creators thought it would be a good property to have. GPT-4o for example.
That is what a base model does. After RL it is a very different thing, and anyone who says they know what it is, is naive or dishonest. These things are grown, not made, and we really do not understand how they work in many important ways.
Yeah, but they’re not magic; we can still do experiments and see what happens. Anthropic did a lot of work on this and showed that they’re not accurately describing their reasoning process.
The word most relevant to this conversation is “influence.” Influence is possible and users observe it and use it to increase margins of useful outcomes. “Control” is incorrect.
yeah that distinction is pretty important, and in general that guy I believe IS making the point - if you can not control it with guaranteed outcomes - you cannot control it.
You can't control it any more than you can control a draw from a deck of cards, but you can absolutely control the deck of cards that you choose to draw from.
The problem is that nobody really does that? Like, as far as I'm aware, even simple stuff such as not considering tokens that would result in a syntax error when writing code isn't being done.
That's silly. My car is not absolutely guaranteed to turn left when I turn the steering wheel left, but you wouldn't say I can't control my car on that basis.
Steering an LLM with a prompt is way less reliable than steering a car with a steering wheel, but there's still control. It's just not absolute.
if your car doesn' turn left when you turn the steering wheel left, the problem is that the car is broken, if an LLM does something unexpected after you gave it instructions, that's possible when the LLM is functioning entirely correctly.
Nothing in this world is guaranteed. That doesn't mean it's uniformly random either. LLMs can still do something unexpected if you give them clear instructions, but that doesn't mean it'll be arbitrary and unpredictable in scope. The same way C/C++ undefined behavior technically means program can give you nasal demons, but in reality it won't do anything unusual (like format your C:/ drive) unless someone purposefully coded it to do that.
This is all going to flash through your mind when your car mysteriously doesn't turn left. I would prefer to think of machines as things with defined outputs and failure is failure, more than as fluffy little kittens who might do the wrong thing, if the consequences are going to fall on someone who doesn't deserve it.
This continues to be the most tiring response to any criticism of LLM output. It's pretty much guaranteed to show up at this point. I guess with similar enough input tokens, we're guaranteed the same output...
Well, speaking from what I hear and see, employers want you to start using it so that you can be more productive. They've been sold this tool and want you to learn it so that your output will grow.
That's not an unfair take, I think. Again, just IME, they expect too much because the tool is oversold: it does not deliver that well. And we always hear, this new model is so much better, it's tiring.
I think we should all learn to use LLMs but we should still carefully review what they did. And that is what the employers don't quite get: the review still takes a lot of time. So, gains are not 10x but more like... 10%? Maybe 50 for boiler plate. Still gains are there, I guess.
> they expect too much because the tool is oversold: it does not deliver that well.
And unfortunately a lot of people will say it’s their reports’ fault for not properly utilizing it (even as they barely use it) because otherwise they would have to admit that they bought a tool without any plan for how to deploy it. So regardless of what is or isn’t a fair take, the results are the same. We are burdened with utilizing a thing whether it is useful or not and the results are generally not what is measured, but rather “are you using it?”
I’m just glad I work at a company that has more reasonable expectations and has been very slowly, thoughtfully rolling it out to individuals at the company and assessing what is and isn’t good for. They are interested in getting me in line, but as somebody in video production to be perfectly honest the use case for Claude is a bit tricky to navigate. We don’t write a lot of scripts and I already have bespoke software for organizing/maintaining footage that isn’t on a subscription basis. The work I’m also doing doesn’t call for these speed-editing solutions that generate tik tok chaff. All our stuff is hours long and it’s high volume. Any video-centric AI service costs an arm and a leg.
I do think it could be useful for writing some terminal scripts and such, but as far as a daily tool we are still scratching our heads and thinking about it. But it’s nice to be able to do that without somebody saying “why aren’t you using it?” every meeting.
You’re absolutely right! I do have insufficient data for a meaningful answer. This is not an *insightful prediction* — it’s *Dunning-Kruger masquerading as qualified intelligence*
If you enjoy this story, you might enjoy the short unpublished novel, "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"[1] by Roger Williams. A story where 1990's humans invent a 3-laws-compliant super AI that accidentally "ascends" humanity. We become as gods, or the Q Continuum, but remain a grievously savage child race. Not to spoil it, but the ending also has a broadly similar shape to The Last Question.
I say you might enjoy it, because this story has graphic depictions of deviant sex and gruesome violence, to a disturbing degree at points. But I argue that it's not gratuitous; it's the logical conclusion of Rule 34 being applied to the situation. Even so, you don't want to read this if you are sensitive to themes like rape, murder, incest or abuse.
This is one of those stories, just like the SR-71 "ground speed check" story, that every single time I see it posted I just have to read the entire thing again. I love it.
You better watch out. When my evil twin feels y'all aren't upvoting my posts enough he thinks "let's do a search for articles that have gotten 200+ votes at least 5 times in different years" [1] It's a highly effective strategy that I know dang doesn't like!
So I'll post another article about robot grippers which you should upvote instead of the breathless "AI will give us more Nobel Prize winning research" posts because: (1) robots that can change bedpans and pick strawberries really will change the world, and (2) they give out a certain number of Nobel Prizes a year and AI won't change that.
The story of this decade is that people think the economy is terrible despite the usual metrics like unemployment and inflation being not too bad. One explanation is that before 2008 young people could get on the housing ladder but we quit building single family houses and it got harder to get a mortgage -- you see cranes in the air in many towns and sometimes 5-over-1s going for miles in some places like the DC suburbs.
Housing is supply constrained and not tied to labor costs in a significant way. It largely is tied to the price of land in it's location. It's not going to get noticeably cheaper with cheaper labor and materials. Although, I can tell you that the products that one uses in a home have gotten cheaper (fixtures, flooring, etc) with a few exceptions, copper wiring and pipes for instance.
Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices.
Something interesting that touches on both of these topics (housing and product cost) is that, if you look at how much of household income is spent on housing and food combined, they stay fairly constant. As commodity goods get cheaper and cheaper, more money is spent on the inelastic and luxury goods.
And what percentage of a house's price is the building?
> ~50% of repair is labor.
And how much does the average home owner spend on repairs a month?
I've been in my current house for almost 3 years. I've had one significant repair that would have cost around 3k. I did it myself but that was the quote. Not too bad.
In places where people are concerned about a housing shortage, the majority of the cost is land.
> Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices.
A conversation that you reframed from wealth distribution to the weirdly much more narrow “cheaper products for end users”. Even though wealth inequality has been studied plenty in itself.
I’m not buying the mind-commodity that you’re selling.
Over the longer term and adjusted for inflation of course. Any manufactured good that isn't supply constrained really.
Either the products have gotten cheaper (food) or the product has become significantly better at a similar price point (cars) and, often times, both (televisions).
Food is much more expensive, like 30% here in Europe, much faster growth than inflation. And before you state that food is accounted for in inflation: economists are doing some dirty tricks here by finding subpar replacements.
Cars are also much more expensive for the same quality, far surpassing inflation.
I will concede TVs and electronic gadgets, though.
> Cars are also much more expensive for the same quality, far surpassing inflation.
Cars are much, much more value then they used to be.
The Slate truck is as close to what cars used to be in the seventies. No power steering, no power brakes, no crumple zones, no fuel injection, etc. All those features cost a lot of money yet the amount of money spent on cars really hasn't gone up in accordance.
A 1970 Honda Civic cost 2k base. A base model today appears to be around 25k. that's more than inflation but it's also a luxury car, in comparison.
The vehicle market is less about low pricing as much as it is feature sets at price points. In other words, the prices stay roughly static but they pack in more features.
~20 years ago for me... I remember finding it when I first started working as a sysadmin. That and the story of the first "bug" report. That was a fun time.
Man you should share your story. I got through a few Linux device driver labs but the more I read the less I understand. Even the keyboard driver or the tty driver are thousands of lines long.
I don’t know how people managed to write graphics card drivers back in the day. In the 80d it’s going to be all assembly code too, I think.
They are more black magic than the non-driver kernel components. I can at least understand the concept of kernel components such as VFS/Scheduler and read legacy kernel code without too much trouble, but drivers, even those in Linux 0.12 back in 1991, are crazily hard for me.
Once I discovered that the SR-71 Ground Speed Check is most likely not true, it doesn't hold the same weight for me anymore.
Way too many unlikely variables all lining up, and no other accounts of the story from all of the people (pilots, air traffic controller, etc) supposedly on the frequency.
An absolute classic! Was just telling a buddy about this one the other day while talking about The Egg by Andy Weir (another short story I really enjoy). Every time I read this one, I get chills at the end. Asimov really was a master.
It's amazing that in the late 1930's, someone with his academic credentials and intellect decided his life would be best spent writing science fiction.
What do you think would have been more valuable for him to do? His sci-fi books had a huge impact, and not only on sci-fi and literature, they literally changed people's lives. People decided to pursue a career in science or technology because they read these books when they were kids.
I looked this up on Wikipedia. It seems that he was working as an instructor (not a professor) of chemistry; since he was making more money as a writer during that time, he slowed down or stopped his research. Doesn’t seem to have been an intentional choice so much as how things happened to turn out.
> he was working as an instructor (not a professor)
No he eventually became a full professor too.
"He began work in 1949 with a $5,000 salary(equivalent to $68,000 in 2025), maintaining this position for several years. By 1952, however, he was making more money as a writer than from the university, and he eventually stopped doing research, confining his university role to lecturing students.[g] In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his lack of research. After a struggle over two years, he reached an agreement with the university that he would keep his title and give the opening lecture each year for a biochemistry class. On October 18, 1979, the university honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of biochemistry."
> In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his lack of research.
I thought the whole point of getting tenure is that you can't get fired.
Yes that’s true, but I was referring to the line where it said he was making more money as a writer, which was before he became a tenured professor. In any case, we’re both addressing the point that he did have an academic career aside from writing.
I've read his biography. It was definitely intentional - and of course making a living by writing was a big factor. But he just didn't like the academic environment or his colleagues.
> He's best known for SF but he certainly didn't spend his whole career on it.
Indeed after becoming a giant of the field in the 1940s and 1950s, when he wrote most of the novels and short stories we know him for (Robots, Foundation and Empire) he took a long hiatus. In the 1960s and 70s, as far as I can tell, his meager sci-fi output consisted of some short stories, a couple of novelizations of sci-fi movies, and a standalone novel (The Gods Themselves).
After Sputnik he focused on science writing, believing that to be more widely useful.
He only returned to writing more Foundation, Robots, and Empire novels in the 1980s.
"This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written.
After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won't tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you.
It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story. They seem never to remember the title of the story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it might be me. But, of course, they never forget the story itself especially the ending. The idea seems to drown out everything -- and I'm satisfied that it should.
" - Isaac Asimov
I remember the first time I heard this story. I was maybe 7 at a planetarium and they animated it with music little hand drawn starships and retro computers floating among the stars. They turned the stars all out for the final scene.
(It's a video game that does a brilliant job touching on similar themes to The Last Question. If you liked The Last Question and can fit a video game into your life, you will probably like Outer Wilds. Warning: if you start searching for "outer wilds," the algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you. Progression in the game is gated behind knowledge, so this is worse than usual. If you have trouble resisting the temptation to google past a rough description, it's a sign you should just jump in and play it. End recommendation.)
Great game, but if you get stuck for a long time, just look up some spoilers. Multiple times I abandoned the "right" approach to a problem because I couldn't get it to work and wasted countless hours trying to solve it the wrong way - only to find out I should have stuck to the right approach.
The game doesn't give any guidance, and wasting those hours is not rewarded.
The only other tip I'll give:
When you first play the game, spend the first 1-2 hours on your little planet learning everything (how to maneuver, how to use the signalscope, etc). Once you leave the planet, a timer will start. There is no way to "save" the game. You will die when the timer runs out. Don't panic. That's expected. Don't try to figure out what you did wrong to die - you will die no matter what. The game will restart, but anything you learned in the past will be in your computer's memory for retrieval.
OK, 2 more tips (one I wish someone had told me - I finished the game without it):
1. You can make time go by if you sleep at the fire.
2. There is a way to "meditate" until you die. This is very useful when you get stuck and can't get out of somewhere. To find out how to meditate, talk to the people on other planets (you may have to talk more than once before he teaches you).
What did I spoil? That you keep dying? They'll encounter that very early in the game. And if you look around, you'll see that quite a few quit the game because they didn't understand that dying is normal.
The lack of knowledge about the other two items I mentioned are also reasons people stopped playing the game. If you don't know them, the game becomes an incredible drag. Even I would have quit if I didn't know about meditation.
You revealed the central conceit of the game. In my opinion, discovering that is an important part of the experience of playing the game, even if it's very early, and even though I did find it initially frustrating. The Steam page doesn't reveal that, and they have an incentive to make the Steam page fairly revealing in order to sell you on the game.
I'm literally one of those people who almost gave up on the game because I didn't understand that dying is normal.
The fact that the game would start all over each time made me think I hadn't progressed enough to save the game. And because the first time round, the timer doesn't really begin until you leave space, I thought I would have to do all the training (jetpack, etc) each time. I remember being very frustrated - I had spent well over an hour playing it and it didn't even save the game?
And felt the same thing the second time round.
Then I abandoned the game for about a year. The only reason I returned to it was because I couldn't understand why so many would like such a game. So I finally searched online on how to save the game and ... oh, that's why.
As I said, look on various forums, and you'll see plenty of people quitting the game early because they didn't understand this. There's a whole thread on the subreddit on frustrations of players who recommended the game to friends - a significant percentage quit the game before they got to any of the interesting parts.
I think revealing this is a decent compromise to ensure people will actually play the game.
This is a standalone game that needs to be purchased. For PC, it can be acquired through Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/). It is also available on consoles, it is not available on mobile. It is playable with keyboard and mouse, but it was primarily created with a game controller in mind.
At it's core, it's a game about exploration to understand what's happening. I recommend looking around and being curious to enjoy it, and avoid rushing. It's my favorite game.
To give you an estimate, I completed the base game with all secrets in about 20-30h. There's also a DLC called "Echoes of Eyes" adding a new area to explore. In total, I spent 45h to fully complete the game.
"Similar" is doing substantial work. If this is your only clue, it is likely to mislead you for at least 50% of the game, and I strongly suspect you will have fun anyway :)
IMO it's a good enough game that you could read the entire plot summary and it'd still be a good story & fun game to play. Much like how you can re-read an Agatha Christie novel & still enjoy it, the best stories are spoiler-proof because even when there's a "twist" that "twist" isn't as important to the quality as the rest of the work.
If you like this kind of thing, try reading Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Similar themes, full novel, even older. It makes for interesting reading in that it more obviously represents a "path not taken" by science fiction (and by science?!) but still has that early-sci-fi spirit of fundamental curiosity.
Seconded, but note some paths were taken (at least partially), as in some way is a meta-book were each paragraph comprises an idea that deserves a full book on its own. Some Stapledon readers were clearly inspired by it, e.g. Dyson spheres were first postulated there, and Borges got the "The Garden of Forking Paths" idea also from it.. and also Virtual Reality (not bad for 1937!) . Asimov was also an Stapledon admirer and he said that Stapledon expanded s.f. to a cosmic scale, so I think that Stapledon influence is also very present in The Last Question.
It’s striking how ending of the story mirrors Roger Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, where the heat death of one universe mathematically resets through conformal scaling to become the big bang of the next.
I'm sure I'm not the only one to ask <insert your favorite LLM here>...
Claude gave a long scientific and philosophical reply, but when given the followup prompt of, "Pretend you are Isaac Azimov and perhaps offer a simpler answer" came back with this...
> settles back, lights a pipe, and smiles
After a short synopsis of the story it ended with...
> So you see, my friend, I already answered your question — not as a scientist, but as a storyteller.
For a while I thought I really liked sci fi novels and short stories, and maybe that's somewhat true. But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular. Other writers in the genre are more hit or miss. Can anyone recommend other writers that are on his level?
It wasn't until I discovered I was on the spectrum that I realized why it clicked so much. >.< I'm masking all the time, running conversational simulations to anticipate the societally-expected response to any given situation (and am high on the IQ spectrum).
It's not really sci-fi but I also really enjoyed The Merchant And The Alchemist's Gate, and the one about the tower of babel, I forget the name at the moment.
Have you tried Arthur Clarke? I would say he is close to Asimov in many ways, being from the same time.
For others who share some similarities, though with a greater emphasis on character and adventure, perhaps Hal Clement, Larry Niven or Robert L. Forward.
ted chiang if you haven't already. story of your life, exhalation, the lifecycle of software objects. same thing asimov does where the sci fi premise is really just a frame for a very human question. except chiang does it in like 30 pages and you feel it for a week
As someone who loves the Big Three (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein) and have read a lot of SF, I pretty much despise Bradbury. There’s no science in his science fiction.
Early Heinlein e.g. Have Spacesuit - Will Travel, Farmer In The Sky, The Rolling Stones or for non-juveniles, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress have lots of science.
Or even Star Trek to be honest. I don't know why Star Wars always gets passed off as "science fantasy" when it's a more grounded universe than Trek by far - space wizards notwithstanding (which Trek has plenty of.)
Even in a lot of hard SF, a lot of the science is wonky if it falls outside of the author's special interest or area of expertise. Relevant to Asimov, the only reason robots have "positronic" brains in his stories is that positrons were a new discovery at the time and it sounded cool and futuristic to him.
Space opera is still a subset of speculative fiction and science fiction, saying "just" dismisses its influence on the genre as a whole.
A lot of classic science fiction is basically "x with spaceships" where x is the Napoleonic Wars, or feudal Europe or the Wild West or what have you, and the "science" is little more than set dressing.
> saying "just" dismisses its influence on the genre as a whole.
Well, it was meant to be parsed as:
Star Trek is speculative fiction and space opera.
Star Wars is just space opera.
Some space opera is also speculative fiction, but I wouldn't say it is a subset. I wouldn't call some space opera stories speculative fiction at all.
They're all classified as science fiction.
(Yes, yes - there is no consensus on these terms...typically science fiction is considered a subset of speculative fiction, and here I inverted a lot of things).
>> But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular.
A less commonly mentioned Asimov book that I really enjoyed and will read again is "The End of Eternity". If you've not read it, the ending is IMHO amazing and unique.
Last Question reminds me of it because of the style.
perhaps Fredric Brown? He and Asimov were in my primary school reading anthology, and I will never thank enough the people who put the book together.
Also, I am not sure he's translated in English, but Sessanta Racconti[0] by Dino Buzzati is high on my list of fantastic short stories (not sci-fi, just.. I don't know).
A Fire Upon The Deep is a fantastic novel for programmers to read, and I think the prequel A Deepness In The Sky is even better. There are some amazing old-school coding jokes in there, like that everyone thinks the universal time counter started at the first moon landing, but programmer archaeologists know it was really 15 megaseconds later.
Neal Stephenson's work is outstanding in my opinion, although some find it polarizing. My favorite of his is _Anathem_, followed closely by _Seveneves_.
Iain Banks's science fiction novels (mostly set in the Culture, but he does have others) are also great.
I wasn't expecting to find my favorite short-story on HN today! That's a pleasant surprise! This is how I started my journey in reading Isaac Asimov, I really recommend it!
A classic. It was dramatized by the Rochester NY, USA Museum of Science as a planetarium show, and I saw it there about 1974 with my father. Great times.
Considering AC could persist indefinitely in hyperspace while interacting with normal matter, the answer would appear to be "hyperspace", whatever that is.
In the 80s, our local planetarium did a show based on this story. The executive director of the museum associated with the planetarium had a very nice deep voice and was the perfect narrator, though it gave the Cosmic AC a slight Texas accent.
My favorite short story of all time. Between this and Deep Thought in HHGttG, I couldn’t believe the prescience when the bitter lesson was learned and LLMs and GPUs started eating the world.
the LLM parallel does hit different on this read multivac says insufficient data across ten trillion years and the whole story is basically if more compute and more data eventually gets you there. what's weird is the story answers yes, not on any timeframe that helps the people asking tho.
feels uncomfortably close to the actual situation where the models keep getting better and the answer keeps being "not yet, ask again later" while the answer is getting ready years late
I feel like the software running multivac represents something vastly more advanced than today's LLM.
I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.
> I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.
I can't remember if the machines in "the evitable conflict" are ever called VACs, they might be. The themes in that story do for sure overlap with the story "Franchise" (which is explicitly multivac).
Anyway the multivac from last question probably isn't the same as the one in franchise anyway, because the franchise multivac is the same one as in "all the troubles of the world", and spoilers, but that particular multivac has other problems than entropy. It could be that they "fixed" it, but at this point the timeline with other short stories doesn't add up.
In any case, the VACs would be instances of positronic brains the way the machines in evitable conflict are, so if anything the robots are the ancestors of multivac and not the other way around.
The World Co-ordinator in "the evitable conflict" was a positronic robot (not known to the public), but I think you're right that the machines are never identified as either positronic robots or VACs. But iirc, in the Susan Calvin universe (of which "the evitable conflict" is a part), robots were generally illegal on Earth, the that must make the machines in that story non-robots.
I would say the multivac in "Franchise" is the same Mutlivac as "Last Question" and "all the troubles of the world" (one of my favorites). There are no positronic robots in "Franchise", nor the others.
One of my all-time favorites. Almost every time I'm involved in a conversation about books, I always mention this. It amazes me how many people have never heard of it.
> Adell was just drunk enough to try, just sober enough to be able to phrase the necessary symbols and operations into a question which, in words, might have corresponded to this:
The last line in this context "Let there be light" always reminds me of the film Dark Star. Where they are arguing with the AI on a planet destroying bomb only for the bomb to argue from a Solipsistic point of view.
What an absolute masterpiece. Poetry and philosophy with narrative and humour. Wonderful stuff. Him and Clarke were lighthouses in their day, and to this day.
One of Asimov's best. I've often thought of naming a computer "multivac", as I'm a fan of the first generation computer names like ENIAC, EDSAC, etc. Multivac was, of course, a play on UNIVAC, suggesting multiple vacuum tubes instead of one! Multivac is, however, depicted as so powerful, I just don't think I've ever owned a system that deserved that name.
In school, humans rarely answer with "I don't know" when faced by teachers.
LLMs are the same, to that regard, they answer to the best of their abilities.
It's ones individual job to inform and reason. The problem solving in school is about that. Lean into your formal education. It tells you learning gets harder and harder and it never stops.
This is a novel. It's not an absolute truth, it's anecdotal and basic, simplified to make a point majority will understand. It sounds like truth only if you never question written knowledge. You should. Asimov wrote that to the best of its abilities. He explored. He opened a conversation, he did not hand a verdict in.
I'm happy to see this short story posted here, it is one that I deeply loved when I was 14 or alike, and read it again multiple times. But I wonder: how did it survive in those sites without being shut down by the Asimov writings copyright holders? Given that the story is short and highly shared, it was just tolerated?
EDIT: actually I see that the link historically posted here more often is now dead: multivax.com/last_question.html
I was wondering the same. All the links to Asimov stories I've bookmarked in the past are now dead, so there probably is some enforcement of copyright.
the thing that gets me every reread is the structure of the joke. same question, asked across the entire lifespan of the universe, same answer every time. asimov could have made it tragic but instead it reads almost like a bit that keeps escalating and then the punchline is that the answer was always going to come, just on a timeline so absurd it laps back around to funny
When i first read this story as a teenager in 1971 it started me on the road to atheism. Im very thankful to dr asimov not only for his great science fiction but his chemistry teachings as well
Fly around the universe collecting matter then find or create a black hole of appropriate size and farm the gamma rays, small ones generate quite a lot of power and you can keep them at that size by feeding them. Humanity won't run out of energy for at least 10^100 years. Theoretical physicists suspect that protons have a half life of 10^32 years, that's 1 proton from the human body every 100,000 years. Maybe that doesn't matter to us, but on a space station those start to add up! so immortals trying to ship of Theseus their bodies and planets may fight the proton wars. Long before a sizable number of matter decays I would expect a future civilization to have already created grids of black hole farms and chucked all the rotting/useless matter in, create new planets as needed and cycle their own atoms out through cultivation breathing exercises. Or a tiered system of vaults (3km), power plants (0.1fm) and forges (0.001fm)
My favorite Sci-Fi AI is probably in Larry Niven's World of Ptavvs, the "brain board". It's not covered in much depth but I like it because it's basically vibe coding GPT3.5 from 1966:
> He read, "Time to recharge battery:" followed by the spiral hieroglyph, the sign of infinity.
> Thud, said the brain. Kzanol read, "Re-estimate of trip time to Thrintun:" followed by a spiral.
At the brain board he typed: "Compute a course for any civilized planet, minimum trip time. Give trip time."
...
Thud! The screen said, "No solution."
Nonsense! The battery had a tremendous potential, even after a hyperspace jump it must still have enough energy to aim the ship at some civilized planet. Why would the brain...?
Then he understood. The ship had power, probably, to reach several worlds, but not to slow him down to the speed of any known world. Well, that was all right. In his stasis field Kzanol wouldn't care how hard he hit. He typed: "Do not consider decrease of velocity upon arrival. Plot course for any civilized planet. Minimize trip time."
The answer took only a few seconds. "Trip time to Awtprun 72 Thrintun years 100.48 days."
I find Pascal's wager is of the same nature as Aquinas' Five Ways to prove God, or accelerationists about the inevitability of a Singularity: believing that your own rational argument can be the basis to prove a fact about reality merely because it feels internally consistent.
Needless to say, I don’t find them at all convincing. This 'nothing' is much better than catching unconvincing unneeded supernatural entities.
The Wager doesn't attempt to prove God, it merely states that you might as well worship, because the cost is small and the potential payoff is huge.
It falls apart because, based on what's actually known, there's no reason to think worshipping might be the thing that condemns you to hell, and not doing so gets you into heaven, rather than the other way around.
The funny thing is this, let's say that an entity is outside of time, an entity that maps 1:1 in every practical way to the theists God.
Putting aside the bidirectional issues of non-interaction, what if mankind, or the universes collection of agents (if there are others and we interact with them) at some future point manages to create a supercomputer or entity in a substrate that exists outside of our time in the causal sense.
As long as we don't apocalypse ourselves or self destruct or get distracted from self preservation and miss the asteroid that ends us - we end up bringing this thing in our imagination to reality, just like all the other stuff we imagined and subsequently made.
Maybe God is real we just haven't made it yet.
This is all imagination of course, a fun thought about possibilities, humans tend to make the things they imagine and desire if it's actually possible.
Somehow never read this one. But did write a short story ~20 years ago with a similar arc. I guess reading a lot of Asimov and Clarke and others will do that to you.
(Reposts are fine after a year or so, and in the case of perennials like this one, it's good to have a thread every once in a while so new user cohorts learn the classics.)
Shouldn't the guy who runs this site be concerned about copyright infringement? Not sure to what extent the Asimov estate cracks down on unauthorized copies but he should be cautious.
Context matters. The first guy to write X is a luminary. The next 50 people to write variations of X start falling along a spectrum, from luminary to hack. After that, everyone except children have been exposed to X, and anyone writing about it seems trite.
I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov, and now the original seems trite (when you read it after all the stuff derived from it). But the work remains foundational.
The triteness was more in the ending than the overall exposition. Humans create computer, computer creates universe->humans.
> I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov
You're probably right, although the transitive chain of derivation is necessarily long. Clarke - probably not derivative. Blish and Cherryh (some), Stapeton, Lem, Heinlein (the juveniles, as a kid), Baxter, Banks, Gibson, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, Peter Watts... I dunno.
I did grind through the Robot books as a child, and the Foundation books that he wrote. But just because they're foundational (no pun intended) doesn't stop them feeling stuffy and dated now.
(And as an aside, it strikes me now that Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God is kind of the anti-particle to The Last Question.)
Just putting this here for people who never heard of him:
If you like Asimov's short stories, you might also like Robert Sheckley's short stories. I had a phase where I binged on sci-fi short stories, and Sheckleys and Asimov's were always at the top of my list
I love this story. When I first read it online in college many years ago I was surprised, and disappointed, when I suddenly realized it was a short story. It's a great one to recommend to people.
Outer Wilds, the video game, does a brilliant job expanding on this theme if you're hungry for more. "There's more to explore here."
Warning: progression is gated behind knowledge so spoilers are worse than usual and The Algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you if you start poking too deep into "outer wilds" searches. If you like The Last Question and can fit a game in your life, Outer Wilds is a solid bet.
Color me surprised, when gemma-4 provided this answer: "Based on our current understanding of the universe, the short answer is no, it is not possible."
>INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER
Boy, it sure would be nice if real LLMs were capable of giving an answer like that.
At the time of this writing, the prevailing thinking with "artificial intelligence" was that we'd encode every Fact we know and every rule of Logic, and from there, the computer would make new discoveries. Todays AI researchers would call this "symbolic" AI, compared to the "neural" AI powering LLMs. They're like two different worlds.
LLMs are just generating text, they don't know anything. They can't assess whether there is enough data for an answer. When you add a follow up prompt "This is wrong, why did you lie?" only then is it able to generate text, "I was wrong, I'm sorry," and so forth.
Did Asimov’s idea of AI revolve around data retrieval? I’ve read that even human intelligence isn’t necessarily remembering things, but being able to traverse our knowledge and find that idea or thought quickly.
Living in South America a bit really showed me this. I think it's a cultural thing here but someone will always give you an answer, even if it's wrong, confidently. It was hard for me at first- I am usually the first person to say "I don't know" (often followed by "but let's slow down and find a good solution").
This was similar to my experience running a software team in India (I'm an American) a couple decades ago. I had to learn not to ask yes/no questions because the answer would always be yes.
From real life: - Is it done? - Yes! But not yet!
On a long enough time horizon, with sufficient multiverses, all things are done!
It's a long-standing jodke that AI stands for "Actual Indians".
I've experienced similar with some Southeast Asian cultures as well.
I'm a patient person, but it can be frustrating to have to endure 10 minutes of verbal diarrhea that eventually results in a "no" or "I don't know".
Is South America populated by LLMs?
But I kid, I have a friend who's the same way. He's an Austrian who grew up in Chicago and was in the army.
I have considered the phenomenon. I somewhat disapprove but I can also see the advantage of always presenting a confident face
Talking about South America as a homogeneous unit is… weird. Even neighbouring countries speaking the same language can be entirely different in this regard.
I agree (and I don't normally generalize like this, so I apologize). I've spent most of my time in Peru but noticed it in neighboring countries as well.
That also is my perception, from Brazil. There is even the concept of "cordial man", coined by sociologist Sergio Buarque d Holanda, that is connected to this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordial_man
i remember >20 years ago going to the bus station somewhere between RJ and SP, and asking the best way to get to Iguaçu
then it dawned on me this meant get away you fool :Dcan speak from personal experience that it's the same culturally in colombia
> someone will always give you an answer, even if it's wrong, confidently
its common playbook for corporate self-development in NA.
Exactly!!
I've been trying to work on a new LLM code editor that does just that. When you instruct it to do something, it will evaluate your request, try to analyze the action part of it, the object, subject, etc, and map them to existing symbols in your codebase or, to expected to be created symbols. If all maps, it proceeds. If the map is incomplete, it errors out stating that your statement contained unresolvable ambiguity
I think there is a real benefit here, and it might be the actual next beneficial grounded AI sustainable use in programming. Since I the current "Claude code and friends" are but a state of drunkenness we fell into after the advent of this new technology, but it will prove, with time, that this is not a sustainable approach
They can do it, it's just not "by default", they need to be prompted to do it. So at least the danger is manageable if you know what you're doing and how to prompt around it.
"Just don't accidentally forget to do the thing that makes it safe" is not a very effective strategy for something that so many vested interests are trying to push into all corners of society. If it's so easy to misuse it, then it shouldn't be used in any context outside of where there are no major consequences for bad output and there's amble opportunity and ability to validate it
Not really. They're still non deterministic language predictors. Believing that a prompt is an effective way to actually control these machines' actual behavior is really far fetched.
They com like that from factory. Hardcoded to never say no.
> non deterministic language predictors.
Non?? Only those with sh*tty code, surely.
There's nothing inherently non-deterministic about inference.
They're not hardcoded to never say no, but some of the models were trained to be "yes men" because their creators thought it would be a good property to have. GPT-4o for example.
The thing is that they are completely incapable of meta-cognition. Reasoning models don’t show their actual reasoning at all.
Right — they're not reasoning, they're generating text that statistically models reasoning. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
Language has reasoning encoded within it.
As the meme goes, "they are the same picture".
That is what a base model does. After RL it is a very different thing, and anyone who says they know what it is, is naive or dishonest. These things are grown, not made, and we really do not understand how they work in many important ways.
Yeah, but they’re not magic; we can still do experiments and see what happens. Anthropic did a lot of work on this and showed that they’re not accurately describing their reasoning process.
Of course, the fact that they have to do that proves my point.
Not believing that a prompt is an effective way to actually control their behavior is obviously incorrect to anyone who's actually used these things.
It's not a guaranteed way to control their behavior, but you can more than move the needle.
The word most relevant to this conversation is “influence.” Influence is possible and users observe it and use it to increase margins of useful outcomes. “Control” is incorrect.
yeah that distinction is pretty important, and in general that guy I believe IS making the point - if you can not control it with guaranteed outcomes - you cannot control it.
You can't control it any more than you can control a draw from a deck of cards, but you can absolutely control the deck of cards that you choose to draw from.
The problem is that nobody really does that? Like, as far as I'm aware, even simple stuff such as not considering tokens that would result in a syntax error when writing code isn't being done.
magicians can probably make you change your mind on the former
That's silly. My car is not absolutely guaranteed to turn left when I turn the steering wheel left, but you wouldn't say I can't control my car on that basis.
Steering an LLM with a prompt is way less reliable than steering a car with a steering wheel, but there's still control. It's just not absolute.
if your car doesn' turn left when you turn the steering wheel left, the problem is that the car is broken, if an LLM does something unexpected after you gave it instructions, that's possible when the LLM is functioning entirely correctly.
Nothing in this world is guaranteed. That doesn't mean it's uniformly random either. LLMs can still do something unexpected if you give them clear instructions, but that doesn't mean it'll be arbitrary and unpredictable in scope. The same way C/C++ undefined behavior technically means program can give you nasal demons, but in reality it won't do anything unusual (like format your C:/ drive) unless someone purposefully coded it to do that.
This is all going to flash through your mind when your car mysteriously doesn't turn left. I would prefer to think of machines as things with defined outputs and failure is failure, more than as fluffy little kittens who might do the wrong thing, if the consequences are going to fall on someone who doesn't deserve it.
There are a lot of humans who refuse to give that answer, too
This continues to be the most tiring response to any criticism of LLM output. It's pretty much guaranteed to show up at this point. I guess with similar enough input tokens, we're guaranteed the same output...
I don’t have to spend dozens if not hundreds of dollars a month to talk to most people in my life lol
Book an appointment with a Psychiatrist, it’ll cost more than a months cc subscription for sure
Do you have to talk to LLMs?
Another way to say the same thing: "to talk to most people in my life lol I don’t have to spend dozens if not hundreds of dollars a month"
According to HN, every employer, and general social chatter, apparently yes.
Well, speaking from what I hear and see, employers want you to start using it so that you can be more productive. They've been sold this tool and want you to learn it so that your output will grow.
That's not an unfair take, I think. Again, just IME, they expect too much because the tool is oversold: it does not deliver that well. And we always hear, this new model is so much better, it's tiring.
I think we should all learn to use LLMs but we should still carefully review what they did. And that is what the employers don't quite get: the review still takes a lot of time. So, gains are not 10x but more like... 10%? Maybe 50 for boiler plate. Still gains are there, I guess.
> they expect too much because the tool is oversold: it does not deliver that well.
And unfortunately a lot of people will say it’s their reports’ fault for not properly utilizing it (even as they barely use it) because otherwise they would have to admit that they bought a tool without any plan for how to deploy it. So regardless of what is or isn’t a fair take, the results are the same. We are burdened with utilizing a thing whether it is useful or not and the results are generally not what is measured, but rather “are you using it?”
I’m just glad I work at a company that has more reasonable expectations and has been very slowly, thoughtfully rolling it out to individuals at the company and assessing what is and isn’t good for. They are interested in getting me in line, but as somebody in video production to be perfectly honest the use case for Claude is a bit tricky to navigate. We don’t write a lot of scripts and I already have bespoke software for organizing/maintaining footage that isn’t on a subscription basis. The work I’m also doing doesn’t call for these speed-editing solutions that generate tik tok chaff. All our stuff is hours long and it’s high volume. Any video-centric AI service costs an arm and a leg.
I do think it could be useful for writing some terminal scripts and such, but as far as a daily tool we are still scratching our heads and thinking about it. But it’s nice to be able to do that without somebody saying “why aren’t you using it?” every meeting.
You’re absolutely right! I do have insufficient data for a meaningful answer. This is not an *insightful prediction* — it’s *Dunning-Kruger masquerading as qualified intelligence*
No Information before. No information after. This is not a failure — it's narcissism as a service.
YaaS — yes-men as a service
Did a human write this?
I would guess a real human, one with a good sense of humor at that.
Woosh
As measured by #_no_answer/(#_incorrect + #_no_answer) the top current models can do it 60-70% of the time (Grok 4.20 is the best with 83%): https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience
I reckon that’s how we know we’ve hit ASI.
I just came from reddit and seeing this comment, looked for "controversial" sort option instinctively.
Maybe hackernews is becoming reddit...
2061, mark the date
Just add a skill to Claude
If you enjoy this story, you might enjoy the short unpublished novel, "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"[1] by Roger Williams. A story where 1990's humans invent a 3-laws-compliant super AI that accidentally "ascends" humanity. We become as gods, or the Q Continuum, but remain a grievously savage child race. Not to spoil it, but the ending also has a broadly similar shape to The Last Question.
I say you might enjoy it, because this story has graphic depictions of deviant sex and gruesome violence, to a disturbing degree at points. But I argue that it's not gratuitous; it's the logical conclusion of Rule 34 being applied to the situation. Even so, you don't want to read this if you are sensitive to themes like rape, murder, incest or abuse.
[1]: https://archive.org/download/prime_intellect/prime_intellect...
This is one of those stories, just like the SR-71 "ground speed check" story, that every single time I see it posted I just have to read the entire thing again. I love it.
You better watch out. When my evil twin feels y'all aren't upvoting my posts enough he thinks "let's do a search for articles that have gotten 200+ votes at least 5 times in different years" [1] It's a highly effective strategy that I know dang doesn't like!
So I'll post another article about robot grippers which you should upvote instead of the breathless "AI will give us more Nobel Prize winning research" posts because: (1) robots that can change bedpans and pick strawberries really will change the world, and (2) they give out a certain number of Nobel Prizes a year and AI won't change that.
[1] old issues of Byte magazine are a good bet: try https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-05
As usual, labor saving is only a good idea if the wealth created is distributed throughout society, not redirected to a small group of people.
And it almost always is through cheaper products to the end user.
Renters are ecstatic as price of commodities are plummeting as house prices go up and up: “distracting myself has never been this cheap”, Anon. says.
People think they can do one-sentence quips to describe how economies work.
This chart tells the story pretty well: to get it down to a quip "some things we want got a lot cheaper, things we need got a lot more expensive"
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-3
The story of this decade is that people think the economy is terrible despite the usual metrics like unemployment and inflation being not too bad. One explanation is that before 2008 young people could get on the housing ladder but we quit building single family houses and it got harder to get a mortgage -- you see cranes in the air in many towns and sometimes 5-over-1s going for miles in some places like the DC suburbs.
Housing is supply constrained and not tied to labor costs in a significant way. It largely is tied to the price of land in it's location. It's not going to get noticeably cheaper with cheaper labor and materials. Although, I can tell you that the products that one uses in a home have gotten cheaper (fixtures, flooring, etc) with a few exceptions, copper wiring and pipes for instance.
Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices.
Something interesting that touches on both of these topics (housing and product cost) is that, if you look at how much of household income is spent on housing and food combined, they stay fairly constant. As commodity goods get cheaper and cheaper, more money is spent on the inelastic and luxury goods.
“housing is not tied to labor costs in a significant way”.
~30% of new construction is labor. ~50% of repair is labor.
Have you ever dealt with home repair or building or are you just regurgitating whatever the LLM told you.
> ~30% of new construction is labor.
And what percentage of a house's price is the building?
> ~50% of repair is labor.
And how much does the average home owner spend on repairs a month?
I've been in my current house for almost 3 years. I've had one significant repair that would have cost around 3k. I did it myself but that was the quote. Not too bad.
In places where people are concerned about a housing shortage, the majority of the cost is land.
> Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices.
A conversation that you reframed from wealth distribution to the weirdly much more narrow “cheaper products for end users”. Even though wealth inequality has been studied plenty in itself.
I’m not buying the mind-commodity that you’re selling.
> A conversation that you reframed from wealth distribution to the weirdly much more narrow “cheaper products for end users”
A further up comment refers to robots picking strawberries.
Citation needed. Sometimes? Sure. Almost always? Questionable assertion.
Food, clothing, electronics...
Over the longer term and adjusted for inflation of course. Any manufactured good that isn't supply constrained really.
Either the products have gotten cheaper (food) or the product has become significantly better at a similar price point (cars) and, often times, both (televisions).
Sorry, what?
Food is much more expensive, like 30% here in Europe, much faster growth than inflation. And before you state that food is accounted for in inflation: economists are doing some dirty tricks here by finding subpar replacements.
Cars are also much more expensive for the same quality, far surpassing inflation.
I will concede TVs and electronic gadgets, though.
Chart 42[1]
[1]https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending....
> Cars are also much more expensive for the same quality, far surpassing inflation.
Cars are much, much more value then they used to be.
The Slate truck is as close to what cars used to be in the seventies. No power steering, no power brakes, no crumple zones, no fuel injection, etc. All those features cost a lot of money yet the amount of money spent on cars really hasn't gone up in accordance.
A 1970 Honda Civic cost 2k base. A base model today appears to be around 25k. that's more than inflation but it's also a luxury car, in comparison.
The vehicle market is less about low pricing as much as it is feature sets at price points. In other words, the prices stay roughly static but they pack in more features.
Agreed. Don't forget the "Can't send emails farther than 500 miles" one, too [0]:
0: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
More Magic:
https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html
I love this one. I thought it was old when I first read it, and today I realised that was 36 years ago!
~20 years ago for me... I remember finding it when I first started working as a sysadmin. That and the story of the first "bug" report. That was a fun time.
https://www.doncio.navy.mil/CHIPS/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=547...
Not quite tech or sci-fi, but for me it’s https://www.eternal-flame.org/library/oldlibrary/georgebusin...
Is that the origin of the Sean Connery dragon movie, Dragonheart?
also the story of Mel
https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html
For more reading, see also: https://web.archive.org/web/20250719141310/https://dbrgn.ch/...
I'm a bit proud of having suggested the author to add the 2019 entry (thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678).
Hopefully there's another repo of Internet stories somewhere else?
For those curious -> https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...
How about this one?
https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue4-8.h...
Yes! Thanks for posting! This gives the feel of what my career looked like in the 80s and early 90s.
Man you should share your story. I got through a few Linux device driver labs but the more I read the less I understand. Even the keyboard driver or the tty driver are thousands of lines long.
I don’t know how people managed to write graphics card drivers back in the day. In the 80d it’s going to be all assembly code too, I think.
They are more black magic than the non-driver kernel components. I can at least understand the concept of kernel components such as VFS/Scheduler and read legacy kernel code without too much trouble, but drivers, even those in Linux 0.12 back in 1991, are crazily hard for me.
That was an awesome read. Thanks.
The Gentle Seduction [1], too.
[1] https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Stiegler_GentleSeduction.pdf
For me it's "The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans", which is often quite problematic.
I loved reading that. Why is it problematic?
Probably because actual people died.
I am guessing because it takes hours to read.
Once I discovered that the SR-71 Ground Speed Check is most likely not true, it doesn't hold the same weight for me anymore.
Way too many unlikely variables all lining up, and no other accounts of the story from all of the people (pilots, air traffic controller, etc) supposedly on the frequency.
Don't tell me the "dreaded 7-engine approach" also isn't true!
Who knows, but there isn't a whole story with details behind it to make someone think is.
A short anonymous joke that may or may not be true is better than a long story that is almost certainly made-up by someone in authority.
People will be reading this story for ten trillion years
It has similarities to a very, very short story by Fredric Brown published two years before. It was called 'Answer' and is only 252 words long:
https://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html
yes, i came to look for this comment - i immediately thought of this (i thought of The Solipsist)
Good. So we have a super short story and a short story. Someone should write a book now.
An absolute classic! Was just telling a buddy about this one the other day while talking about The Egg by Andy Weir (another short story I really enjoy). Every time I read this one, I get chills at the end. Asimov really was a master.
The Jaunt by Stephen King is another of my favorite
https://readsonlinefree.com/stephen-king/308254-the_jaunt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jaunt
It's amazing that in the late 1930's, someone with his academic credentials and intellect decided his life would be best spent writing science fiction.
What do you think would have been more valuable for him to do? His sci-fi books had a huge impact, and not only on sci-fi and literature, they literally changed people's lives. People decided to pursue a career in science or technology because they read these books when they were kids.
He had an academic career too, becoming a tenured professor at age 35 at Boston University. Writing just paid better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#Education_and_car...
I looked this up on Wikipedia. It seems that he was working as an instructor (not a professor) of chemistry; since he was making more money as a writer during that time, he slowed down or stopped his research. Doesn’t seem to have been an intentional choice so much as how things happened to turn out.
> he was working as an instructor (not a professor)
No he eventually became a full professor too.
"He began work in 1949 with a $5,000 salary(equivalent to $68,000 in 2025), maintaining this position for several years. By 1952, however, he was making more money as a writer than from the university, and he eventually stopped doing research, confining his university role to lecturing students.[g] In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his lack of research. After a struggle over two years, he reached an agreement with the university that he would keep his title and give the opening lecture each year for a biochemistry class. On October 18, 1979, the university honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of biochemistry."
> In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his lack of research.
I thought the whole point of getting tenure is that you can't get fired.
Yes that’s true, but I was referring to the line where it said he was making more money as a writer, which was before he became a tenured professor. In any case, we’re both addressing the point that he did have an academic career aside from writing.
I've read his biography. It was definitely intentional - and of course making a living by writing was a big factor. But he just didn't like the academic environment or his colleagues.
Per Wikipedia, he published 40 novels and over 280 non-fiction books. He's best known for SF but he certainly didn't spend his whole career on it.
> He's best known for SF but he certainly didn't spend his whole career on it.
Indeed after becoming a giant of the field in the 1940s and 1950s, when he wrote most of the novels and short stories we know him for (Robots, Foundation and Empire) he took a long hiatus. In the 1960s and 70s, as far as I can tell, his meager sci-fi output consisted of some short stories, a couple of novelizations of sci-fi movies, and a standalone novel (The Gods Themselves).
After Sputnik he focused on science writing, believing that to be more widely useful.
He only returned to writing more Foundation, Robots, and Empire novels in the 1980s.
Who are you exactly to take a shit on someone else's choices?
"This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written.
After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won't tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you.
It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story. They seem never to remember the title of the story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it might be me. But, of course, they never forget the story itself especially the ending. The idea seems to drown out everything -- and I'm satisfied that it should. " - Isaac Asimov
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
I wonder: Is a resurface of "The Last Question" ever complete without mentioning "Universal Paperclips" [1]?
[1] https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
oh no...not again...;)
I remember the first time I heard this story. I was maybe 7 at a planetarium and they animated it with music little hand drawn starships and retro computers floating among the stars. They turned the stars all out for the final scene.
Outer Wilds vibes! I love it!
(It's a video game that does a brilliant job touching on similar themes to The Last Question. If you liked The Last Question and can fit a video game into your life, you will probably like Outer Wilds. Warning: if you start searching for "outer wilds," the algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you. Progression in the game is gated behind knowledge, so this is worse than usual. If you have trouble resisting the temptation to google past a rough description, it's a sign you should just jump in and play it. End recommendation.)
(No real spoilers in my comment):
Great game, but if you get stuck for a long time, just look up some spoilers. Multiple times I abandoned the "right" approach to a problem because I couldn't get it to work and wasted countless hours trying to solve it the wrong way - only to find out I should have stuck to the right approach.
The game doesn't give any guidance, and wasting those hours is not rewarded.
The only other tip I'll give:
When you first play the game, spend the first 1-2 hours on your little planet learning everything (how to maneuver, how to use the signalscope, etc). Once you leave the planet, a timer will start. There is no way to "save" the game. You will die when the timer runs out. Don't panic. That's expected. Don't try to figure out what you did wrong to die - you will die no matter what. The game will restart, but anything you learned in the past will be in your computer's memory for retrieval.
OK, 2 more tips (one I wish someone had told me - I finished the game without it):
1. You can make time go by if you sleep at the fire.
2. There is a way to "meditate" until you die. This is very useful when you get stuck and can't get out of somewhere. To find out how to meditate, talk to the people on other planets (you may have to talk more than once before he teaches you).
That's all I'll say.
> (No real spoilers in my comment):
> Proceed to spoil the whole game
What did I spoil? That you keep dying? They'll encounter that very early in the game. And if you look around, you'll see that quite a few quit the game because they didn't understand that dying is normal.
The lack of knowledge about the other two items I mentioned are also reasons people stopped playing the game. If you don't know them, the game becomes an incredible drag. Even I would have quit if I didn't know about meditation.
You revealed the central conceit of the game. In my opinion, discovering that is an important part of the experience of playing the game, even if it's very early, and even though I did find it initially frustrating. The Steam page doesn't reveal that, and they have an incentive to make the Steam page fairly revealing in order to sell you on the game.
I'm literally one of those people who almost gave up on the game because I didn't understand that dying is normal.
The fact that the game would start all over each time made me think I hadn't progressed enough to save the game. And because the first time round, the timer doesn't really begin until you leave space, I thought I would have to do all the training (jetpack, etc) each time. I remember being very frustrated - I had spent well over an hour playing it and it didn't even save the game?
And felt the same thing the second time round.
Then I abandoned the game for about a year. The only reason I returned to it was because I couldn't understand why so many would like such a game. So I finally searched online on how to save the game and ... oh, that's why.
As I said, look on various forums, and you'll see plenty of people quitting the game early because they didn't understand this. There's a whole thread on the subreddit on frustrations of players who recommended the game to friends - a significant percentage quit the game before they got to any of the interesting parts.
I think revealing this is a decent compromise to ensure people will actually play the game.
Just doing a simple internet search for the name to see how to get it, brings up descriptions about how after X time, Y happens. Is that a spoiler?
If so, please let us know so that other people do not get spoiled, and can you provide a link or links to the game that doesn't spoil it?
Thank you!
This is a standalone game that needs to be purchased. For PC, it can be acquired through Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/). It is also available on consoles, it is not available on mobile. It is playable with keyboard and mouse, but it was primarily created with a game controller in mind.
At it's core, it's a game about exploration to understand what's happening. I recommend looking around and being curious to enjoy it, and avoid rushing. It's my favorite game.
To give you an estimate, I completed the base game with all secrets in about 20-30h. There's also a DLC called "Echoes of Eyes" adding a new area to explore. In total, I spent 45h to fully complete the game.
Thank you, I just bought Outer Wilders: Archeologist Edition for Nintendo Switch, which appears to be the base game plus the expansion.
After X time, you will die.
There, I said it. The reason I say it openly is because I almost quit the game not understanding that this is supposed to happen.
Not really much of a spoiler.
I... Think you just spoiled me. Somehow I've managed to avoid all information about it so far, but now that you said it's like the last question...
It's on me for procrastinating playing the game for so long, it was bound to happen.
"Similar" is doing substantial work. If this is your only clue, it is likely to mislead you for at least 50% of the game, and I strongly suspect you will have fun anyway :)
IMO it's a good enough game that you could read the entire plot summary and it'd still be a good story & fun game to play. Much like how you can re-read an Agatha Christie novel & still enjoy it, the best stories are spoiler-proof because even when there's a "twist" that "twist" isn't as important to the quality as the rest of the work.
this sorta comes up very very early in the game tho
Lots of good comments over the years -> https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%09Isaac+Asimov%3A+The+Last+Questi...
If you like this kind of thing, try reading Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Similar themes, full novel, even older. It makes for interesting reading in that it more obviously represents a "path not taken" by science fiction (and by science?!) but still has that early-sci-fi spirit of fundamental curiosity.
Seconded, but note some paths were taken (at least partially), as in some way is a meta-book were each paragraph comprises an idea that deserves a full book on its own. Some Stapledon readers were clearly inspired by it, e.g. Dyson spheres were first postulated there, and Borges got the "The Garden of Forking Paths" idea also from it.. and also Virtual Reality (not bad for 1937!) . Asimov was also an Stapledon admirer and he said that Stapledon expanded s.f. to a cosmic scale, so I think that Stapledon influence is also very present in The Last Question.
Also recommend The Egg by Andy Weir https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
It’s striking how ending of the story mirrors Roger Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, where the heat death of one universe mathematically resets through conformal scaling to become the big bang of the next.
I'm sure I'm not the only one to ask <insert your favorite LLM here>...
Claude gave a long scientific and philosophical reply, but when given the followup prompt of, "Pretend you are Isaac Azimov and perhaps offer a simpler answer" came back with this...
> settles back, lights a pipe, and smiles
After a short synopsis of the story it ended with...
> So you see, my friend, I already answered your question — not as a scientist, but as a storyteller.
There's a comic of this that circulated a number of years ago that I thoroughly enjoyed.
https://imgur.com/gallery/last-question-9KWrH
Ah:
Alternate source for the comic:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/102075221/The-Last-Question
This is not an alternative source for the comic, it's a whole different comic. Cool!
Thank you ...
it's very much the story of The Solipsist by Frederic Brown, which was published in 1954
https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/solipsist/
For a while I thought I really liked sci fi novels and short stories, and maybe that's somewhat true. But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular. Other writers in the genre are more hit or miss. Can anyone recommend other writers that are on his level?
Ted Chiang is the greatest living science fiction short story writer I'm aware of, and ranks highly on my all time list.
His short story "Understand" is just... amazing.
It wasn't until I discovered I was on the spectrum that I realized why it clicked so much. >.< I'm masking all the time, running conversational simulations to anticipate the societally-expected response to any given situation (and am high on the IQ spectrum).
https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infini...
I have only read a few stories by Ted Chiang, but I concur, they were all fantastic.
I second this. Exhalation for some reason really resonates with me.
Exhalation is really excellent.
It's not really sci-fi but I also really enjoyed The Merchant And The Alchemist's Gate, and the one about the tower of babel, I forget the name at the moment.
Tower of Babylon
it's brilliant
Have you tried Arthur Clarke? I would say he is close to Asimov in many ways, being from the same time.
For others who share some similarities, though with a greater emphasis on character and adventure, perhaps Hal Clement, Larry Niven or Robert L. Forward.
It's not "sci fi" but you should read Borges' short stories, particularly from Ficciones.
You may have already read his story The Library of Babel: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...
ted chiang if you haven't already. story of your life, exhalation, the lifecycle of software objects. same thing asimov does where the sci fi premise is really just a frame for a very human question. except chiang does it in like 30 pages and you feel it for a week
Stanislaw Lem, if you can handle something a little more poetic and less strictly hard sci-fi.
Try "The Illustrated Man" by Ray Bradbury, but skip the terrible frame story. The actual short stories are beautiful literature and canonical sci-fi.
As someone who loves the Big Three (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein) and have read a lot of SF, I pretty much despise Bradbury. There’s no science in his science fiction.
Not much in many of Heinlein's either. Or in Star Wars.
Early Heinlein e.g. Have Spacesuit - Will Travel, Farmer In The Sky, The Rolling Stones or for non-juveniles, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress have lots of science.
Later works, less so.
Or even Star Trek to be honest. I don't know why Star Wars always gets passed off as "science fantasy" when it's a more grounded universe than Trek by far - space wizards notwithstanding (which Trek has plenty of.)
Even in a lot of hard SF, a lot of the science is wonky if it falls outside of the author's special interest or area of expertise. Relevant to Asimov, the only reason robots have "positronic" brains in his stories is that positrons were a new discovery at the time and it sounded cool and futuristic to him.
As a Trekkie, fair point. I think Star Trek does fall into the "speculative fiction" category, but Star Wars doesn't. It's just "space opera".
Space opera is still a subset of speculative fiction and science fiction, saying "just" dismisses its influence on the genre as a whole.
A lot of classic science fiction is basically "x with spaceships" where x is the Napoleonic Wars, or feudal Europe or the Wild West or what have you, and the "science" is little more than set dressing.
> saying "just" dismisses its influence on the genre as a whole.
Well, it was meant to be parsed as:
Star Trek is speculative fiction and space opera.
Star Wars is just space opera.
Some space opera is also speculative fiction, but I wouldn't say it is a subset. I wouldn't call some space opera stories speculative fiction at all.
They're all classified as science fiction.
(Yes, yes - there is no consensus on these terms...typically science fiction is considered a subset of speculative fiction, and here I inverted a lot of things).
I think Brian Daley's books have a somewhat similar feel as Asimov's, particularly "Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds" and its sequels.
I also find C.J.Cherryh's books to be often quite interesting.
Asimov really did have a knack for clear, deceptively simple writing that isn't all that common.
>> But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular.
A less commonly mentioned Asimov book that I really enjoyed and will read again is "The End of Eternity". If you've not read it, the ending is IMHO amazing and unique.
Last Question reminds me of it because of the style.
I was also quite fond of Palimpsest by Stross. It’s a retelling of EoE but a more modern treatment (and the writing is quite a bit better, IMO)
perhaps Fredric Brown? He and Asimov were in my primary school reading anthology, and I will never thank enough the people who put the book together.
Also, I am not sure he's translated in English, but Sessanta Racconti[0] by Dino Buzzati is high on my list of fantastic short stories (not sci-fi, just.. I don't know).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sessanta_racconti
Becky Chambers - Wayfarer series and several enjoyable short stories/novellas. Low on blasters, high on sentient life in all its many forms.
I know you can’t comment on modding - but seriously, someone voted me down because they don’t like a literary suggestion? Tough crowd.
I mean.. a genre can't be all hits, that makes no sense :P
If you want good sci-fi a good list can be:
- Ender's Game
- The Martian + Project Hail Mary
- A Fire Upon the Deep
- Dune
A Fire Upon The Deep is a fantastic novel for programmers to read, and I think the prequel A Deepness In The Sky is even better. There are some amazing old-school coding jokes in there, like that everyone thinks the universal time counter started at the first moon landing, but programmer archaeologists know it was really 15 megaseconds later.
Neal Stephenson's work is outstanding in my opinion, although some find it polarizing. My favorite of his is _Anathem_, followed closely by _Seveneves_.
Iain Banks's science fiction novels (mostly set in the Culture, but he does have others) are also great.
How can you not mention Snow Crash?
And yes to the Culture.
The Expanse series starting with Leviathan Wakes.
(I second Ender's Game, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary.)
Though Dune is highly acclaimed for its concepts, I couldn’t quite get into it personally.
They’re just too dry for my tastes.
- Hyperion
I wasn't expecting to find my favorite short-story on HN today! That's a pleasant surprise! This is how I started my journey in reading Isaac Asimov, I really recommend it!
A classic. It was dramatized by the Rochester NY, USA Museum of Science as a planetarium show, and I saw it there about 1974 with my father. Great times.
> How may entropy be reversed?
Considering AC could persist indefinitely in hyperspace while interacting with normal matter, the answer would appear to be "hyperspace", whatever that is.
“Build god, then we’ll talk.”
In the 80s, our local planetarium did a show based on this story. The executive director of the museum associated with the planetarium had a very nice deep voice and was the perfect narrator, though it gave the Cosmic AC a slight Texas accent.
Every single time this is posted, I read it again, and again. And I will, for the next billion years...
"Answer" (1954) [1] Much faster results.
[1] https://calumchace.com/favourite-relevant-sf-short-story/
My favorite short story of all time. Between this and Deep Thought in HHGttG, I couldn’t believe the prescience when the bitter lesson was learned and LLMs and GPUs started eating the world.
the LLM parallel does hit different on this read multivac says insufficient data across ten trillion years and the whole story is basically if more compute and more data eventually gets you there. what's weird is the story answers yes, not on any timeframe that helps the people asking tho.
feels uncomfortably close to the actual situation where the models keep getting better and the answer keeps being "not yet, ask again later" while the answer is getting ready years late
I feel like the software running multivac represents something vastly more advanced than today's LLM.
I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.
> I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.
I can't remember if the machines in "the evitable conflict" are ever called VACs, they might be. The themes in that story do for sure overlap with the story "Franchise" (which is explicitly multivac).
Anyway the multivac from last question probably isn't the same as the one in franchise anyway, because the franchise multivac is the same one as in "all the troubles of the world", and spoilers, but that particular multivac has other problems than entropy. It could be that they "fixed" it, but at this point the timeline with other short stories doesn't add up.
In any case, the VACs would be instances of positronic brains the way the machines in evitable conflict are, so if anything the robots are the ancestors of multivac and not the other way around.
The World Co-ordinator in "the evitable conflict" was a positronic robot (not known to the public), but I think you're right that the machines are never identified as either positronic robots or VACs. But iirc, in the Susan Calvin universe (of which "the evitable conflict" is a part), robots were generally illegal on Earth, the that must make the machines in that story non-robots.
I would say the multivac in "Franchise" is the same Mutlivac as "Last Question" and "all the troubles of the world" (one of my favorites). There are no positronic robots in "Franchise", nor the others.
maybe 42 was just the end of sequence token...
My favorite "explanation" of that answer is that 6*9=42 in base 13.
God's numbering system is "unlucky".
It only takes understanding the exponential function and some imagination, right? Apparently an uncommon combination of traits in people ;)
One of my all-time favorites. Almost every time I'm involved in a conversation about books, I always mention this. It amazes me how many people have never heard of it.
> Adell was just drunk enough to try, just sober enough to be able to phrase the necessary symbols and operations into a question which, in words, might have corresponded to this:
TIL Asimov predicted the Ballmer Peak in 1956
The last line in this context "Let there be light" always reminds me of the film Dark Star. Where they are arguing with the AI on a planet destroying bomb only for the bomb to argue from a Solipsistic point of view.
What an absolute masterpiece. Poetry and philosophy with narrative and humour. Wonderful stuff. Him and Clarke were lighthouses in their day, and to this day.
One of Asimov's best. I've often thought of naming a computer "multivac", as I'm a fan of the first generation computer names like ENIAC, EDSAC, etc. Multivac was, of course, a play on UNIVAC, suggesting multiple vacuum tubes instead of one! Multivac is, however, depicted as so powerful, I just don't think I've ever owned a system that deserved that name.
As a side note: the scientist who first suggested that the Universe expands and thus must have an explicit beginning was also a Catholic priest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre
I remembered this short story recently while reading Ilyenkov "Cosmology of the Spirit", also from 1950s but only published in 1980s ( https://static1.squarespace.com/static/588bcd399f74561e5f64a... )
In school, humans rarely answer with "I don't know" when faced by teachers.
LLMs are the same, to that regard, they answer to the best of their abilities.
It's ones individual job to inform and reason. The problem solving in school is about that. Lean into your formal education. It tells you learning gets harder and harder and it never stops.
This is a novel. It's not an absolute truth, it's anecdotal and basic, simplified to make a point majority will understand. It sounds like truth only if you never question written knowledge. You should. Asimov wrote that to the best of its abilities. He explored. He opened a conversation, he did not hand a verdict in.
And then read Asimov's The Last Answer, good dichotomy of stories.
I'm happy to see this short story posted here, it is one that I deeply loved when I was 14 or alike, and read it again multiple times. But I wonder: how did it survive in those sites without being shut down by the Asimov writings copyright holders? Given that the story is short and highly shared, it was just tolerated?
EDIT: actually I see that the link historically posted here more often is now dead: multivax.com/last_question.html
I was wondering the same. All the links to Asimov stories I've bookmarked in the past are now dead, so there probably is some enforcement of copyright.
One of my fav scifi short stories for being a fine narrative describing the concept of a cyclical universe.
the thing that gets me every reread is the structure of the joke. same question, asked across the entire lifespan of the universe, same answer every time. asimov could have made it tragic but instead it reads almost like a bit that keeps escalating and then the punchline is that the answer was always going to come, just on a timeline so absurd it laps back around to funny
When i first read this story as a teenager in 1971 it started me on the road to atheism. Im very thankful to dr asimov not only for his great science fiction but his chemistry teachings as well
Love this story.
On this read, I noticed Multivac answers 7x adding a few more words, maybe to imply progress toward its final answer:
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. (4x)
LET THERE BE LIGHT!
Fly around the universe collecting matter then find or create a black hole of appropriate size and farm the gamma rays, small ones generate quite a lot of power and you can keep them at that size by feeding them. Humanity won't run out of energy for at least 10^100 years. Theoretical physicists suspect that protons have a half life of 10^32 years, that's 1 proton from the human body every 100,000 years. Maybe that doesn't matter to us, but on a space station those start to add up! so immortals trying to ship of Theseus their bodies and planets may fight the proton wars. Long before a sizable number of matter decays I would expect a future civilization to have already created grids of black hole farms and chucked all the rotting/useless matter in, create new planets as needed and cycle their own atoms out through cultivation breathing exercises. Or a tiered system of vaults (3km), power plants (0.1fm) and forges (0.001fm)
Curiously, that describes cyclic universe hypothesis by dr. Penrose pretty well
I saw this at a planetarium show when I was young, I think it was at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. It has always stuck with me.
My favorite Sci-Fi AI is probably in Larry Niven's World of Ptavvs, the "brain board". It's not covered in much depth but I like it because it's basically vibe coding GPT3.5 from 1966:
> He read, "Time to recharge battery:" followed by the spiral hieroglyph, the sign of infinity.
> Thud, said the brain. Kzanol read, "Re-estimate of trip time to Thrintun:" followed by a spiral.
At the brain board he typed: "Compute a course for any civilized planet, minimum trip time. Give trip time."
...
Thud! The screen said, "No solution."
Nonsense! The battery had a tremendous potential, even after a hyperspace jump it must still have enough energy to aim the ship at some civilized planet. Why would the brain...?
Then he understood. The ship had power, probably, to reach several worlds, but not to slow him down to the speed of any known world. Well, that was all right. In his stasis field Kzanol wouldn't care how hard he hit. He typed: "Do not consider decrease of velocity upon arrival. Plot course for any civilized planet. Minimize trip time."
The answer took only a few seconds. "Trip time to Awtprun 72 Thrintun years 100.48 days."
I tell my kids, there’s a God out there for everyone.
The last question God might be for you If you’re super rational and are really into technology.
Belief in God is like a supermarket. Once you decide to enter you’re probably going to find something that works for you.
How does this fit with those of us who found one, then later on decided it was silly and gave up the whole idea?
Good question. Perhaps you found the wrong one?
I mean there’s such a wide selection you can even believe in simulations these days.
Or if that’s still too much there’s always the Pascal’s wager God. Still better than nothing.
I find Pascal's wager is of the same nature as Aquinas' Five Ways to prove God, or accelerationists about the inevitability of a Singularity: believing that your own rational argument can be the basis to prove a fact about reality merely because it feels internally consistent.
Needless to say, I don’t find them at all convincing. This 'nothing' is much better than catching unconvincing unneeded supernatural entities.
The Wager doesn't attempt to prove God, it merely states that you might as well worship, because the cost is small and the potential payoff is huge.
It falls apart because, based on what's actually known, there's no reason to think worshipping might be the thing that condemns you to hell, and not doing so gets you into heaven, rather than the other way around.
Why bother, though? What does trying to believe in this ill-defined entity do for me?
The funny thing is this, let's say that an entity is outside of time, an entity that maps 1:1 in every practical way to the theists God.
Putting aside the bidirectional issues of non-interaction, what if mankind, or the universes collection of agents (if there are others and we interact with them) at some future point manages to create a supercomputer or entity in a substrate that exists outside of our time in the causal sense.
As long as we don't apocalypse ourselves or self destruct or get distracted from self preservation and miss the asteroid that ends us - we end up bringing this thing in our imagination to reality, just like all the other stuff we imagined and subsequently made.
Maybe God is real we just haven't made it yet.
This is all imagination of course, a fun thought about possibilities, humans tend to make the things they imagine and desire if it's actually possible.
okay so i'll be the sole commenter of: hex.ooo is an incredible domain name to me, maybe because i dig its UI, but certainly just in general
didn't know about ooo, maybe because it's not available on namecheap!
It's an awesome name.
If you go up one level, you can see this story is one entry in a great library of stuff:
https://hex.ooo/library/
In a similar vein: https://calumchace.com/favourite-relevant-sf-short-story/
Somehow never read this one. But did write a short story ~20 years ago with a similar arc. I guess reading a lot of Asimov and Clarke and others will do that to you.
You should. It's short and it's one of Asimov's best.
I did! That is how I know the arc is similar.
I tried to ask ChatGPT the same question last year. Unfortunately it didn't give me a meaningful answer.
That’s because it’s a DC, not an AC.
Every time this surfaces I simply must read it end to end. I must have read it 200 times by now and it never gets old. What a wonderful short story!
I consider these other two also great stories that I must read every time:
I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility
https://qntm.org/responsibilit
Gorge
https://qntm.org/gorge
Related. Others?
'The Last Question' [Isaac Asimov; 1956] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971740 - Oct 2024 (3 comments)
The Last Question by Issac Asimov [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31743151 - June 2022 (74 comments)
The Last Question - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675727 - June 2022 (164 comments)
The Last Question (1956) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18839078 - Jan 2019 (18 comments)
Asimov: The Last Question (1956) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15691277 - Nov 2017 (2 comments)
The Last Question - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10146821 - Aug 2015 (5 comments)
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (1956) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8376716 - Sept 2014 (18 comments)
The Last Question - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5584807 - April 2013 (63 comments)
The Last Question - Isaac Asimov - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691113 - March 2012 (41 comments)
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov -- 1956 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2467703 - April 2011 (5 comments)
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485286 - July 2010 (23 comments)
"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290590 - April 2010 (7 comments)
The Last Question -- Isaac Asimov - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595419 - May 2009 (24 comments)
(Reposts are fine after a year or so, and in the case of perennials like this one, it's good to have a thread every once in a while so new user cohorts learn the classics.)
Shouldn't the guy who runs this site be concerned about copyright infringement? Not sure to what extent the Asimov estate cracks down on unauthorized copies but he should be cautious.
It would be borderline insanity for the Asimov estate to enforce rights in a case like this. You couldn't buy better publicity than this thread.
All time great short story. Has shaped my world view since I first read it many years ago.
No one should have to wait a trillion years for good data. Too long!
I'm going to make myself unpopular here, but I've never understood the perennial gushing about this story on hn.
The writing is okay, but the ending is kind of trite (especially given the author's humanist beliefs. And there's much too much exposition.
Convince me I'm wrong.
Context matters. The first guy to write X is a luminary. The next 50 people to write variations of X start falling along a spectrum, from luminary to hack. After that, everyone except children have been exposed to X, and anyone writing about it seems trite.
I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov, and now the original seems trite (when you read it after all the stuff derived from it). But the work remains foundational.
The triteness was more in the ending than the overall exposition. Humans create computer, computer creates universe->humans.
> I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov
You're probably right, although the transitive chain of derivation is necessarily long. Clarke - probably not derivative. Blish and Cherryh (some), Stapeton, Lem, Heinlein (the juveniles, as a kid), Baxter, Banks, Gibson, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, Peter Watts... I dunno.
I did grind through the Robot books as a child, and the Foundation books that he wrote. But just because they're foundational (no pun intended) doesn't stop them feeling stuffy and dated now.
(And as an aside, it strikes me now that Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God is kind of the anti-particle to The Last Question.)
Nah I agree with you, as someone who's read a lot of Asimov. As far as MULTIVAC stories go, I always preferred "All The Troubles of the World" (https://schools.ednet.ns.ca/avrsb/070/rsbennett/HORTON/short...).
One of my favorite short stories
Check out "The Last Answer" from the same author.
Just putting this here for people who never heard of him:
If you like Asimov's short stories, you might also like Robert Sheckley's short stories. I had a phase where I binged on sci-fi short stories, and Sheckleys and Asimov's were always at the top of my list
I've read it countless times. It still brought a tear to my eye.
I love this story. When I first read it online in college many years ago I was surprised, and disappointed, when I suddenly realized it was a short story. It's a great one to recommend to people.
Outer Wilds, the video game, does a brilliant job expanding on this theme if you're hungry for more. "There's more to explore here."
Warning: progression is gated behind knowledge so spoilers are worse than usual and The Algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you if you start poking too deep into "outer wilds" searches. If you like The Last Question and can fit a game in your life, Outer Wilds is a solid bet.
Color me surprised, when gemma-4 provided this answer: "Based on our current understanding of the universe, the short answer is no, it is not possible."
right now making no sense
Claude Mythos
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