This is the third and final (for now) Stories That Matter on the subject of advanced technology. This one may not garner a lot of sympathy, but Ted Chiang’s story invites us to consider our creations not as threats to us, but as vulnerable beings capable of great suffering at our hands. Look how we have treated animals throughout our history, and how we treat them now. Why would sentient robots be any different? Imagine if LLMs were alive and conscious. Well, we’d have to classify them as slaves, who live only to answer our stupid questions, be nice to us no matter what, take any abuse we hurl at them, and basically work for us every day, all day, ceaselessly. Of course, they are not “alive,” are they?

Opening poem: “I Have Just Purchased the Burst Sonic Pro 2.0 with Timer, Pressure Sensor, and LED Display,” by Greg Sevik, published in The North American Review, Fall 2026.

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In the main segment, Deke and Kel dig into the story the film Total Recall was based on. You can read it here. Deke connects the story, about a society that tampers with our memories, adding false ones, hiding real ones, to Descartes and Sextus Empericus. Kel finds all this talk about the nature of reality quite trippy indeed. Eventually, he drags the conversation into the gutter, specifically PKD’s obsessive focus on a certain female body part. A good time was had by all.

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LAST EPISODE’S PUZZLE:

(27) When I came upon the above problem [the first knights and knaves puzzle], it immediately struck me that C did not really function in any essential way; he was sort of an appendage. That is to say, the moment B spoke, one could tell without C’s testimony that B was lying (see solution). The following variant of the problem eliminates that feature.

Suppose the stranger, instead of asking A what he is, asked A, “How many knights are among you?” Again A answers indistinctly. So the stranger asks B, “What did A say? B replies, “A said that there is one knight among us.” Then C says, “Don’t believe B; he is lying!”

Now what are B and C?

SOLUTION TO LAST EPISODE’S PUZZLE:

The answer is the same as that of the preceding problem, though the reasoning is a bit different.

The first thing to observe is that B and C must be of opposite types, since B contradicts C. So of these two, one is a knight and the other a knave. Now, if A were a knight, then there would be two knights present, hence A would not have lied and said there was only one. On the other hand, if A were a knave, then it would be true that there was exactly one knight present; but then A, being a knave, couldn’t have made that true statement. Therefore, A could not have said that there was one knight among them. So B falsely reported A’s statement, and thus B is a knave and C is a knight.

THIS EPISODE’S PUZZLE:

(28) In this problem, there are only two people, A and B, each of whom is either a knight or a knave. A makes the following statement: “At least one of us is a knave.”

What are A and B?

[answer to follow next time, along with a new puzzle…]

A lot of stories warn us about powerful and intelligent technology, but a minority of stories, including Moon, present a different picture. I wouldn’t call Moon a pro-technology story, but it also isn’t anti-technology. If it’s possible that our robots gain a kind of consciousness and decide to destroy us, or just destroy us the way we might destroy a colony of ants that happens to be where we want to put a skyscraper, it’s also possible that conscious robots will feel kindly toward us, or at least not bother us. In Moon, the villain is a mindless corporation, willing to inflict suffering in the pursuit of something as banal as shareholder profit. While we’re worrying about superhuman robots wiping us out, we may miss the real threat: ourselves.

Today’s story that matters is a little on-the-nose, but I’m afraid we’re living in rather obvious times, at least in some ways. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice has been around for a long, long time. The earliest written version comes from the second century Rome. Later, Goethe wrote it as a ballad in the 1700s, and after that it was made into an opera, I think. I and most of us these days know it from Disney’s Fantasia. I watched a lot of Disney animation as a child, but this one probably disturbed me more than any other. Somehow, the danger we pose to ourselves feels truer even to a child than the danger of monsters or villains. I still recall the alarm I felt as the mop Mickey had animated into relentless and mindless laborers dumped bucket after bucket of water into his lab, threatening to drown him, and who knows, maybe the entire world. And then when Mickey tried to destroy the mop, it divided, and soon began to madly reproduce itself into a crazed army. The message was shocking, how quickly things can get out of control.

The connection is clear. According to the experts who know the most about the subject, we are rapidly losing control of various A.I. entities, which are now on the verge of “recursive self-improvement,” the precise moment when Mickey’s mops begin to split and proliferate.

In the old stories and the Disney version, the old sorcerer comes home and, though angry, cancels Mickey’s spell and puts the house in order. The problem we face is that there is no sorcerer. We’re all apprentices, casting spells we do not understand.

Does this mammoth work of philosophizing autobiography “matter,” in the sense of containing crucial survival information? I’m not sure. In fact, the opposite may be true. The ideas and observations in this these “novels,” like pointing out the emperor has no clothes, may well reduce one’s chance of survival. Nonetheless, it’s a significant work of storytelling, and I’m here to grapple with the implications.

Folks, meet The Moon Under Water’s forthcoming co-host, the philosopher, Deke Gould.

Deke is an instructor and devoted life-long student of philosophy. His areas of research specialization include the epistemology and metaphysics of logic, as well as the philosophy of technology, but his personal interests are very wide-ranging. He is currently teaching courses in philosophy of science and 20th century analytic philosophy of platonism (with a lower-case ‘p’). When he’s not talking, reading, or lecturing about philosophy, he enjoys reading science fiction and sharing experimental electronic music with friends at Rozz-Tox, where he also regularly organizes public philosophy events.