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Christopher William(李俊龍)
Professor Yen-Chen Chuang
Cinema and Literature
29 December 2022
Pantheon Reflection: The Author’s Take on What If Technology Goes too Far
Technology has forever shaped humanity’s modern life and also made our lives more
convenient and easy to the degree that some can’t live without it. Technology also evolves at
a rapid pace, meaning that more advanced ones are being created to replace old ones in such
short timeframes and those which can capitalize on it, especially multinational corporations,
earning vast sums of profits. This is true in the world of Pantheon, where they transcended
the boundaries of technology to essentially “revive the dead”, albeit in the virtual world. In
this reflection, I will talk about the series’ notable technologies and my opinion on it, as well
as of the series itself. In addition, I will also share my thoughts on what if the feats in
Pantheon are brought over to the real world.
To briefly summarize, the series tells the story of a teenager named Maddie, who
begins to receive text messages from an anonymous sender, who later is revealed to be the
“virtual consciousness” of her late father. Together, along with her mother and her other
“allies” she proceeds to uncover the truth of her father and others just like him. The virtual
consciousness that I described earlier is a form of technology introduced in the movie by a
tech company called Logorhythms called Uploaded Intelligence(UI). This is done by a
machine scanning and dissecting individual pieces of a human’s brain to upload their
consciousness into a cloud, which leaves the physical body dead but are able to emulate the
human mind digitally, free of decay, death, and diseases. This slightly differs from AI in my
opinion, where AIs are machines which stimulate human’s intelligence(entirely new
creations), UIs are in a sense, digital programs which combine a person’s actual knowledge,
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and it's free will with the capabilities to tamper with any technology in the world. What’s
interesting is also the connection between the concept of UI and the meaning of the series
name, Pantheon. According to merriamwebster.com, the suitable definition for Pantheon for
this context would be two things, one being the gods of the people, and a group of illustrious
or notable persons or things. I think the UI concept would best describes both of these
definitions, as only a select view, namely those familiar in IT and great minds alike are those
who are uploaded into the cloud, and due the nature of humanity’s overdependence on
technology, these people are essentially gods and can impact other people’s lives however
their please. In the movie’s case for example, it can range from manipulating people’s
personal electronics to launching nuclear missiles. The second notable technology is the
ability to “reincarnate” a deceased person. In the series, the tritagonist character Caspian, is
revealed to be the “artificial reincarnation” of Logorhythm’s late founder Stephen Holstrom,
complete with the said person’s knowledge. Not only that, the people who created him, even
his parents, expected Caspian to dedicate his entire life to continue what Stephen has left off
in the company. In my opinion, I think that this concept is a bit weird, yet fascinating at the
same time. Imagine if Apple is currently headed by a 16 year old CEO, who has the same
innovative and aspiring mind as Steve Jobs, that would surely be too good to be true and will
shock not just the entire board members, but the entire public itself.
Regarding my opinion on the series, I think that overall, the series is quite intriguing
for me to watch. In terms of story, it all seems ambiguous at the first few episodes, when the
three main characters are introduced separately(Maddie, Caspian, and Chanda), but as the
series progresses and all the main and supporting characters come together, their interactions
and dynamics start to form and conflicts arise between them. This combined with some of the
emotional scenes, fantasy-esque virtual fight scenes, and numerous mystery elements and
plot twists makes this series worthwhile to watch. I also think that the principles of Sci Fi in
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this series are not too far-fetched, meaning that in the near future, the idea of UI is still within
the realm of possibility for humans to create, especially when we consider the rapid
advancements of our technology. In my point of view, the series also greatly reflects the
author’s point of view on what if the world has reached a (technological) singularity, which is
also pointed out by the series’ “antagonist” Chanda. This notion of singularity is a
hypothetical future where technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible,
causing unforeseeable change in human civilization. In the series, after Chanda leaked the UI
program to governments around the world, he managed to turn the world into chaos, where
many countries “upload” their best programmers and hackers to wage wars against each other
in a digital warfare with disastrous global damages such as the aforementioned nuclear
weapons involvement. Imagine if this invention is applied into the real world, where people
are realistically inseparable from technology and world leaders, especially of
global
superpowers, are getting ruthless by the day in expanding their global sphere of influence.
Ordinary civilians would inevitably suffer from the impact of these endless political cyber
warfare and the world as we know it will be completely altered. To sum up my opinion, if a
company decided to develop a technology similar to UI, it has to do whatever it takes to make
sure that the truth is kept secret and does not fall into the wrong hands, so as to preserve the
current world’s peace and order by not not letting some random and irresponsible people or
organization play “god” over the rest of humanity, thus delaying the technological singularity
point.
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Works Cited
Han, Angie, and Mitch McConnell. “'Pantheon' Review: AMC+'s Animated Sci-Fi Series –
The Hollywood Reporter.” The Hollywood Reporter, 1 September 2022,
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-reviews/pantheon-tv-review-1235209482/.
Accessed 30 December 2022.
Stamper, Joshua. “Pantheon Definition & Meaning.” Merriam-Webster,
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pantheon. Accessed 30 December 2022.
Toumey, Chris. “singularity | technology.” Britannica,
https://www.britannica.com/technology/singularity-technology. Accessed 30
December 2022.
Tallerico, Brian. “AMC+’s Pantheon is Challenging Animated Sci-fi for Adults |
TV/Streaming.” Roger Ebert, 30 August 2022,
https://www.rogerebert.com/streaming/pantheon-tv-review-2022. Accessed 30
December 2022.
“Uploaded Intelligence | Pantheon Wiki | Fandom.” Pantheon Wiki, 8 December 2022,
https://pantheon-amc.fandom.com/wiki/Uploaded_Intelligence. Accessed 30
December 2022.