Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

Posted by ColinWright 22 hours ago

Comments

Comment by Procrastes 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by jjoonathan 20 hours ago

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.)

Comment by BeetleB 19 hours ago

(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.

Comment by ghssds 16 hours ago

> (No real spoilers in my comment):

> Proceed to spoil the whole game

Comment by BeetleB 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by fwipsy 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by BeetleB 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by rcoveson 6 hours ago

A revelation of a mysterious element of the game which is not revealed in any of its marketing material is a spoiler. The fact that you believe it's a "decent compromise" doesn't enter into it. The proper disclaimer for your comment would be: "Spoilers, but I think these things should be spoiled."

I played the game years ago and did not have this element spoiled, and I thought it was presented at exactly the right time and in the right way. I'd go so far as to say that if somebody is so frustrated by that early mystery (which you're all but guaranteed to understand better and better as you play) that they quit there, then the rest of the game will just be an exercise in misery. It's a puzzle game. The developers put settings in place to cut the flight mechanics out of it so people could just experience it as a puzzle box instead of a flight simulator as well. What they did NOT put in the game is a hint about the thing you're spoiling.

Comment by patcon 5 hours ago

You perhaps have a unique neurotype that wouldn't experience the intended positive revelation from the reveal. You are still ruining something for many more others than you are helping.

Please consider accepting what your critics are telling you, and remove the spoiler.

Comment by kelnos 9 hours ago

I haven't played the game, was interested in it (I've heard of it before, just haven't gotten around to playing it yet), and I was a bit bummed to read about this unusual game mechanic without discovering for myself.

Comment by monsieurbanana 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by jjoonathan 20 hours ago

"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 :)

Comment by SAI_Peregrinus 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by cdelsolar 20 hours ago

this sorta comes up very very early in the game tho

Comment by rationalist 19 hours ago

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!

Comment by demurgos 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by rationalist 18 hours ago

Thank you, I just bought Outer Wilders: Archeologist Edition for Nintendo Switch, which appears to be the base game plus the expansion.

Comment by BeetleB 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by triceratops 20 hours ago

"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

Comment by chii 3 hours ago

You know the idea is powerful when the idea is what gets remembered and not the author of the idea. It's why this is also my absolute fav of all his works.

Comment by ahazred8ta 2 hours ago

Obligatory xkcd. Mouseover for The Last Answer. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1448:_Question

Comment by FriarTech 6 hours ago

I had read this in my youth, and carried its memory for many years. Sharing my knowledge of the story with no one, for no one I knew was a big Asimov fan.

Later, while attending college, I decided to take an astronomy course as a general education class. I discovered my teacher was a big Asimov fan. He had remembered a story that he had read and shared its theme with us but had forgotten its name. I raised my hand in class and said, “Eyes do more than see.”

And for a brief moment - two Asimov fans nodded at each other.

Back then - I wasn’t a remarkable student. I was lost in many thoughts.

But I do remember this:

On the final exam for this class - for extra credit - he asked “What is answer to the Last Question?”

I smiled - then wrote my answer. The only answer. And I knew I got at least one question correct on that exam.

Comment by golem14 3 hours ago

Just made the connection to Douglas Adams. The question which has the Answer 42.

TIL

Comment by jjice 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by m-p-3 14 hours ago

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

Comment by ANTHONY6632 20 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by jimmydddd 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by glerk 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by triceratops 20 hours ago

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...

Comment by us-merul 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by triceratops 20 hours ago

> 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."

Comment by utopcell 13 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by us-merul 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by BeetleB 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by wat10000 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by triceratops 19 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by Henchman21 15 hours ago

Who are you exactly to take a shit on someone else's choices?

Comment by jasongill 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by PaulHoule 21 hours ago

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

Comment by gwerbin 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by parineum 19 hours ago

And it almost always is through cheaper products to the end user.

Comment by joquarky 8 hours ago

Prices going down is called deflation.

Comment by keybored 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by PaulHoule 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by parineum 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by elictronic 12 hours ago

“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.

Comment by parineum 12 hours ago

> ~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.

Comment by carefree-bob 8 hours ago

> In places where people are concerned about a housing shortage, the majority of the cost is land.

This is true in constrained areas like SF bay area. Back when I was digging into real estate economics, I found data on this from HUD, they have a price indicator dataset. https://www.fhfa.gov/research/papers/wp1901

Also look at the Lincoln Institute, they have fantastic studies.

In places like San Francisco, 80% of the value is in the land. In other places, it's 15-35%. The historical national average is about 33% but now it's a bit higher.

Completely different economic rules dominate in constrained areas like San Francisco versus unconstrained areas like Phoenix. But most housing is in unconstrained areas, the constrained areas are expensive elite sections. In most of the country, house prices track construction costs, and the high land prices are effectively economic segregation that weed out antisocial people, causing these areas to be even more desirable and sought after, which raises the bar even higher. All "nice areas" are nice because of gatekeeping, and in the US this is usually high land prices. Traditionally, each city had its own immigration policy, and they would chase out of town people who weren't seen as productive or who were antisocial, and as a result, you would have poor people living on the outskirts of towns.

In places like SF, richer people move in, house prices go up but there is not much change in the population. In other places, more people move in and more housing is built.

A lot of the debate surrounding housing boils down to people imagining a world where SF housing rules applies and thinking this is appropriate national policy, or others looking at national datasets and thinking this would apply to places like SF. Much of housing and land economics seems counterintuitive, for example how cities get less dense over time, e.g. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/working-papers/pers...

But once you learn how to think about it, it all makes sense.

Comment by gwerbin 9 hours ago

> And what percentage of a house's price is the building?

Anecdotally like half, depending on the area. Plots of land go for $500k in Boston suburbs and new construction homes go for $1m.

Comment by keybored 16 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by parineum 12 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by gwerbin 17 hours ago

Citation needed. Sometimes? Sure. Almost always? Questionable assertion.

Comment by parineum 17 hours ago

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).

Comment by prerok 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by parineum 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by jihadjihad 21 hours ago

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

Comment by rationalist 21 hours ago

More Magic:

https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html

Comment by nickt 20 hours ago

I love this one. I thought it was old when I first read it, and today I realised that was 36 years ago!

Comment by kraquepype 18 hours 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...

Comment by xeonmc 20 hours ago

Not quite tech or sci-fi, but for me it’s https://www.eternal-flame.org/library/oldlibrary/georgebusin...

Comment by IAmBroom 20 hours ago

Is that the origin of the Sean Connery dragon movie, Dragonheart?

Comment by robinpie 9 hours ago

The network electrically incompatible with Excel:

https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem...

Comment by riffraff 16 hours ago

also the story of Mel

https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

Comment by rouvax 20 hours ago

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?

Comment by sebg 21 hours ago

For those curious -> https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...

Comment by markus_zhang 21 hours ago

How about this one?

https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue4-8.h...

Comment by ggerules 19 hours ago

Yes! Thanks for posting! This gives the feel of what my career looked like in the 80s and early 90s.

Comment by markus_zhang 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by b3lvedere 21 hours ago

That was an awesome read. Thanks.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 17 hours ago

The Gentle Seduction [1], too.

[1] https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Stiegler_GentleSeduction.pdf

Comment by zem 3 hours ago

hadn't read that one before! thanks for sharing it

Comment by Toutouxc 20 hours ago

For me it's "The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans", which is often quite problematic.

Comment by derwiki 20 hours ago

I loved reading that. Why is it problematic?

Comment by JKCalhoun 20 hours ago

Probably because actual people died.

Comment by cdelsolar 20 hours ago

I am guessing because it takes hours to read.

Comment by rationalist 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by actionfromafar 21 hours ago

Don't tell me the "dreaded 7-engine approach" also isn't true!

Comment by rationalist 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by CGMthrowaway 20 hours ago

People will be reading this story for ten trillion years

Comment by thatoneengineer 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by nahuel0x 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by charonn0 12 hours ago

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...

Comment by Jordan-117 7 hours ago

Note that the final chapter is especially disgusting and explicit, to the point it's arguably a better story if you end it on the preceding cliffhanger rather than subject yourself to the characters becoming vehicles for the author's thinly-veiled pedo-incest fetish. Great, thought-provoking SF apart from that (gigantic) flaw, though.

Comment by charonn0 7 hours ago

Yeah, I thought the main character was a little too insistent about... repopulating. On the other hand, if we're feeling generous we might say the author was intentionally confronting the reader with what is only implied by the Biblical counterpart.

Comment by sebg 21 hours ago

Lots of good comments over the years -> https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%09Isaac+Asimov%3A+The+Last+Questi...

Comment by daveisfera 15 hours ago

Also recommend The Egg by Andy Weir https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

Comment by jadbox 8 hours ago

This is one of my all time favorites and it fits into the line of recent thought that the universe may be primarily conscious rather than "dead matter and dying energy".

Comment by utopcell 13 hours ago

I wonder: Is a resurface of "The Last Question" ever complete without mentioning "Universal Paperclips" [1]?

[1] https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

Comment by eek2121 12 hours ago

oh no...not again...;)

Comment by ChocMontePy 17 hours ago

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

Comment by utopcell 14 hours ago

Good. So we have a super short story and a short story. Someone should write a book now.

Comment by Jordan-117 7 hours ago

This is novella erasure.

Comment by ariuser8434 10 hours ago

yes, i came to look for this comment - i immediately thought of this (i thought of The Solipsist)

Comment by donatj 18 hours ago

There's a comic of this that circulated a number of years ago that I thoroughly enjoyed.

https://imgur.com/gallery/last-question-9KWrH

Comment by ColinWright 17 hours ago

Ah:

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    Learn more about Imgur access in the United Kingdom

Comment by pcrh 16 hours ago

Alternate source for the comic:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/102075221/The-Last-Question

Comment by utopcell 13 hours ago

This is not an alternative source for the comic, it's a whole different comic. Cool!

Comment by ColinWright 16 hours ago

Thank you ...

Comment by bitshiftfaced 21 hours ago

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?

Comment by Arainach 21 hours ago

Ted Chiang is the greatest living science fiction short story writer I'm aware of, and ranks highly on my all time list.

Comment by Darkphibre 20 hours ago

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...

Comment by jperoutek 20 hours ago

I second this. Exhalation for some reason really resonates with me.

Comment by Froztnova 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by kaiokendev 11 hours ago

Tower of Babylon

it's brilliant

Comment by riffraff 16 hours ago

I have only read a few stories by Ted Chiang, but I concur, they were all fantastic.

Comment by NetMageSCW 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by npilk 21 hours ago

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...

Comment by shivaniShimpi_ 21 hours ago

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

Comment by jakeinspace 21 hours ago

Stanislaw Lem, if you can handle something a little more poetic and less strictly hard sci-fi.

Comment by NickDouglas 21 hours ago

Try "The Illustrated Man" by Ray Bradbury, but skip the terrible frame story. The actual short stories are beautiful literature and canonical sci-fi.

Comment by NetMageSCW 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by BeetleB 19 hours ago

Not much in many of Heinlein's either. Or in Star Wars.

Comment by NetMageSCW 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by krapp 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by BeetleB 19 hours ago

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".

Comment by krapp 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by BeetleB 10 hours ago

> 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).

Comment by redsocksfan45 1 hour ago

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Comment by phkahler 21 hours ago

>> 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.

Comment by globular-toast 4 hours ago

Also worth reading, although a very different style is The Gods Themselves. Although, to be honest, I'm not sure there's a single Asimov book I haven't enjoyed and I've read almost all of them.

Comment by sjg1729 20 hours ago

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)

Comment by Esn024 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by riffraff 16 hours ago

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

Comment by robrain 20 hours ago

Becky Chambers - Wayfarer series and several enjoyable short stories/novellas. Low on blasters, high on sentient life in all its many forms.

Comment by robrain 16 hours ago

I know you can’t comment on modding - but seriously, someone voted me down because they don’t like a literary suggestion? Tough crowd.

Comment by globular-toast 3 hours ago

Depends what you consider on his level really. Some find the writing too dry, but maybe you like that? Have you read Dune? What about The Forever War? They are different styles but definitely enjoyed by someone who also likes Asimov.

I didn't get on with Neuromancer or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? at all, though. Suspect you wouldn't either.

I also find stuff like Andy Weir way too literal, like you're basically reading a film script. Asimov leaves a lot more room for imagination.

Comment by boxed 21 hours ago

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

Comment by comicjk 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by mwigdahl 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by NetMageSCW 15 hours ago

How can you not mention Snow Crash?

And yes to the Culture.

Comment by rationalist 21 hours ago

The Expanse series starting with Leviathan Wakes.

(I second Ender's Game, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary.)

Comment by xeonmc 20 hours ago

Though Dune is highly acclaimed for its concepts, I couldn’t quite get into it personally.

They’re just too dry for my tastes.

Comment by baq 21 hours ago

- Hyperion

Comment by redsocksfan45 16 hours ago

Alfred Bester; The Stars My Destination, and The Demolished Man.

Comment by arc_light 21 hours ago

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Comment by Bud 18 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by breuleux 20 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by Lewton 4 hours ago

Thank you!

It really irked me when I read it the first time and it drives me nuts that no one else seems to catch this, you’re the first one in some 100 HN threads to point it out

Comment by mock-possum 17 hours ago

“Build god, then we’ll talk.”

Comment by quentindanjou 21 hours ago

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!

Comment by CGMthrowaway 21 hours ago

>INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER

Boy, it sure would be nice if real LLMs were capable of giving an answer like that.

Comment by temp0826 18 hours ago

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").

Comment by jfaulken 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by ponector 12 hours ago

From real life: - Is it done? - Yes! But not yet!

Comment by disillusioned 11 hours ago

On a long enough time horizon, with sufficient multiverses, all things are done!

Comment by HiPhish 18 hours ago

It's a long-standing jodke that AI stands for "Actual Indians".

Comment by 13 hours ago

Comment by lm411 11 hours ago

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".

Comment by noisy_boy 8 hours ago

I'm genuinely curious if this is a thing with roots in Spanish culture? Because there is strong Spanish influence in Philippines and South America.

I don't know any Spaniards but I do know Filipinos and the confidence projection is a real thing. The Filipino IT guy confidently declared that my OnePlus Android phone wasn't certified for the software he was trying to install and was getting errors. It is a bog standard application that can be installed on any modern Android phone but the level of confidence he projected, just because he didn't know OnePlus as a brand, made me doubt myself until I turned on the critical hat and pushed back a little with alternative approaches, which solved the problem.

Comment by sublimee 9 hours ago

Over the last couple of years, I've spent a lot of time in Indonesia. By the time I got used to their way of communicating, I questioned my own reality, perception and sanity. I even put a thought it's some very passive way of gaslighting foreigners. It seems it's just how they like to do it here.

Comment by throwaway132448 16 hours ago

Talking about South America as a homogeneous unit is… weird. Even neighbouring countries speaking the same language can be entirely different in this regard.

Comment by temp0826 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by thiagoeh 15 hours ago

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

Comment by croisillon 13 hours ago

i remember >20 years ago going to the bus station somewhere between RJ and SP, and asking the best way to get to Iguaçu

  - it's difficult
  - ok fine but how
  - it's difficult
  - right i'll see that but how
  - it's difficult

then it dawned on me this meant get away you fool :D

Comment by CGMthrowaway 4 hours ago

"You can't get there from here"

Comment by wesleyfsmith 15 hours ago

can speak from personal experience that it's the same culturally in colombia

Comment by sieabahlpark 15 hours ago

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Comment by andriy_koval 14 hours ago

> someone will always give you an answer, even if it's wrong, confidently

its common playbook for corporate self-development in NA.

Comment by analog8374 11 hours ago

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

Comment by gwerbin 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by saghm 16 hours ago

"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

Comment by Bridged7756 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by eloisant 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by LPisGood 19 hours ago

The thing is that they are completely incapable of meta-cognition. Reasoning models don’t show their actual reasoning at all.

Comment by DonaldPShimoda 19 hours ago

Right — they're not reasoning, they're generating text that statistically models reasoning. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

Comment by TeMPOraL 12 hours ago

As the meme goes, "they are the same picture".

Comment by guelo 10 hours ago

Language has reasoning encoded within it.

Comment by LPisGood 9 hours ago

It certainly does. But so too do complex neural network functions, as do attention mechanisms.

Comment by jeremyjh 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by LPisGood 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by jeremyjh 14 hours ago

Of course, the fact that they have to do that proves my point.

Comment by chrisjj 11 hours ago

> non deterministic language predictors.

Non?? Only those with sh*tty code, surely.

There's nothing inherently non-deterministic about inference.

Comment by wat10000 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by wwweston 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by fl4regun 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by gwerbin 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by ignaloidas 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by fl4regun 13 hours ago

magicians can probably make you change your mind on the former

Comment by wat10000 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by fl4regun 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by TeMPOraL 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by hyperhello 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by romaniv 19 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by cortesoft 19 hours ago

There are a lot of humans who refuse to give that answer, too

Comment by Tallain 18 hours ago

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...

Comment by Forgeties79 19 hours ago

I don’t have to spend dozens if not hundreds of dollars a month to talk to most people in my life lol

Comment by yakbarber 11 hours ago

Book an appointment with a Psychiatrist, it’ll cost more than a months cc subscription for sure

Comment by _diyar 18 hours ago

Do you have to talk to LLMs?

Comment by vhantz 17 hours ago

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"

Comment by boxedemp 9 hours ago

There are lots of free LLMs, but you (often) pay for the good ones.

There's lots of people with lots of opinions, but you (often) have to pay for the good ones.

Comment by Forgeties79 17 hours ago

According to HN, every employer, and general social chatter, apparently yes.

Comment by prerok 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by Forgeties79 13 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by lynndotpy 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by theturtletalks 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by lern_too_spel 9 hours ago

They can read context and with fairly high accuracy say whether that context contains enough information to answer a posed question. They cannot (and we cannot for them) introspect their own weights to say whether their weights already encode information sufficient to answer a posed question.

Comment by amdivia 13 hours ago

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

Comment by bargainbin 20 hours ago

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*

Comment by croisillon 20 hours ago

No Information before. No information after. This is not a failure — it's narcissism as a service.

Comment by combobyte 17 hours ago

YaaS — yes-men as a service

Comment by fragmede 20 hours ago

Did a human write this?

Comment by mikemarsh 19 hours ago

I would guess a real human, one with a good sense of humor at that.

Comment by fragmede 19 hours ago

Woosh

Comment by ItsClo688 8 hours ago

hahaha, the irony is that "INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER" requires more intelligence than a confident wrong answer. you have to know what you don't know. current LLMs are optimized to always produce output, which means they've essentially been trained out of epistemic humility.

Asimov's Multivac at least had the dignity to wait.

Comment by in-silico 13 hours ago

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

Comment by ryanjshaw 19 hours ago

I reckon that’s how we know we’ve hit ASI.

Comment by narginal 19 hours ago

2061, mark the date

Comment by ButlerianJihad 9 hours ago

This is exactly like a lot of customer service, or technical support.

It seems that they are loath to tell anyone “no”, or that something can’t be done, or that an app doesn’t have a feature or can’t be used in a certain way. Especially when a feature has been removed for security reasons.

In fact, it gets so crazy that I simply cannot get a straight answer out of somebody and if I persist in my line of questioning and they become evasive or vague or I just can’t get a straight answer for long enough, ultimately, I suspect that the answer is “no”, and that they're simply not allowed to tell me, and they're paid and trained specifically to avoid uttering the “n-word”.

In my first job, as a network operator, my supervisor admonished me, and said “we must never tell a customer that we don't know something”. He said that we should tell the customer that “I will go ahead and find out for you, and get back to you on that”.

And that is kind of the kind of slippery non-answer I often received in my most recent job, that some manager or supervisor would “look into something” for me and “get back to me”. But the ‘getting back to me’ part never happened, and I began to suspect that it was a platitude meant to satisfy me enough that I would shut up for a while, and stop pressing the issue.

Comment by otikik 19 hours ago

Just add a skill to Claude

Comment by qsera 11 hours ago

I just came from reddit and seeing this comment, looked for "controversial" sort option instinctively.

Maybe hackernews is becoming reddit...

Comment by larrykluger 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by Animats 16 hours ago

"Answer" (1954) [1] Much faster results.

[1] https://calumchace.com/favourite-relevant-sf-short-story/

Comment by quux 17 hours ago

> 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

Comment by OhMeadhbh 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by hackan 19 hours ago

Every single time this is posted, I read it again, and again. And I will, for the next billion years...

Comment by gloyoyo 7 hours ago

The Abruntive Stance. Initiate the "Hand-back Finality", after the heat death.

Similar to the, "let there be light" moment but, it would also include the imprint of the humans own Abruntive Stance, a part that is equally as important as providing the environment, is providing the humans to go along with it.

;-)

Comment by moffers 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by shivaniShimpi_ 21 hours ago

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

Comment by waltbosz 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by Aerolfos 15 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by waltbosz 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by mercer 20 hours ago

maybe 42 was just the end of sequence token...

Comment by IAmBroom 20 hours ago

My favorite "explanation" of that answer is that 6*9=42 in base 13.

God's numbering system is "unlucky".

Comment by baq 21 hours ago

It only takes understanding the exponential function and some imagination, right? Apparently an uncommon combination of traits in people ;)

Comment by 0xmattf 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by msuvakov 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by satvikpendem 20 hours ago

And then read Asimov's The Last Answer, good dichotomy of stories.

Comment by pugworthy 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by 11 hours ago

Comment by astravagrant 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by swills 9 hours ago

As read by Leonard Nimoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjqjSP7kOO4

Comment by boxedemp 9 hours ago

Thank you, that just made my day.

Comment by infradig 7 hours ago

No 1950s sci-fi story about super-advanced computers is complete without endless clicking relays and flashing bezels.

Comment by rootbear 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by nahuel0x 18 hours ago

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... )

Comment by antirez 20 hours ago

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

Comment by sigalo 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by nine_k 16 hours ago

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

Comment by HerbManic 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by shivaniShimpi_ 19 hours ago

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

Comment by mentalgear 17 hours ago

One of my fav scifi short stories for being a fine narrative describing the concept of a cyclical universe.

Comment by reader_x 18 hours ago

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!

Comment by itmitica 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by elhosots 16 hours ago

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

Comment by bilsbie 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by wat10000 16 hours ago

How does this fit with those of us who found one, then later on decided it was silly and gave up the whole idea?

Comment by bilsbie 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by TuringTest 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by wat10000 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by wat10000 14 hours ago

Why bother, though? What does trying to believe in this ill-defined entity do for me?

Comment by fellowniusmonk 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by ariuser8434 10 hours ago

it's very much the story of The Solipsist by Frederic Brown, which was published in 1954

https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/solipsist/

Comment by andyjohnson0 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by hungryhobbit 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by zem 2 hours ago

this story has arguably aged worse in that respect than asimov's similarly titled "the last answer". that one still evokes a "whoa" when I think about it.

https://www.highexistence.com/the-last-answer-short-story/

Comment by andyjohnson0 14 hours ago

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.)

Comment by zem 2 hours ago

the penultimate line of "the nine billion names of god" has always stayed with me: "there is always a last time for everything". sounds a bit trite just by itself, but it was an incredibly powerful line when I encountered it in the story and that feeling has stayed attached to it for me.

Comment by Nav_Panel 15 hours ago

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...).

Comment by winrid 18 hours ago

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."

Comment by grimgrin 21 hours ago

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!

Comment by criddell 19 hours ago

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/

Comment by zabzonk 21 hours ago

Comment by sprior 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by BoneShard 9 hours ago

in the same vein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA

Comment by RajT88 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by ghaff 20 hours ago

You should. It's short and it's one of Asimov's best.

Comment by RajT88 19 hours ago

I did! That is how I know the arc is similar.

Comment by viktorcode 14 hours ago

Curiously, that describes cyclic universe hypothesis by dr. Penrose pretty well

Comment by hnthrowaway0315 20 hours ago

I tried to ask ChatGPT the same question last year. Unfortunately it didn't give me a meaningful answer.

Comment by layer8 19 hours ago

That’s because it’s a DC, not an AC.

Comment by suzukivenom 3 hours ago

what a beautiful story.

Comment by charv 21 hours ago

All time great short story. Has shaped my world view since I first read it many years ago.

Comment by sergiotapia 19 hours ago

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

Comment by sigalo 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by sowbug 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by LetsGetTechnicl 17 hours ago

One of my favorite short stories

Comment by hydrocomplete 15 hours ago

No one should have to wait a trillion years for good data. Too long!

Comment by dark-star 18 hours ago

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

Comment by throw_m239339 19 hours ago

Check out "The Last Answer" from the same author.

Comment by casey2 10 hours ago

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)

Comment by dang 12 hours ago

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.)

Comment by eschulz 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by jjoonathan 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by globular-toast 18 hours ago

I've read it countless times. It still brought a tear to my eye.

Comment by butz 20 hours ago

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."

Comment by 16 hours ago

Comment by CamperBob2 6 hours ago

Another Asimov classic that deserves a revisit these days, if not an actual reboot: https://www.mathfiction.net/files/Mathfiction-AsimovIssac-So... (1.8 MB .PDF)

    Yet through it all the little computer learned 
    that in the world there existed a great many
    computers of all sorts, great numbers of them. 
    Some were Bards like himself...