The Punishment of Tantalus

Tantalus was a king, and a son of Zeus, and he was invited to eat at the table of the gods, a rare honor. To test whether they were truly all-knowing, he killed his own son, cooked him, and served the body to them as a stew. They knew. For that, Tantalus was sent down to Tartarus, a place Homer describes as lying as far beneath Hades as heaven lies above the earth. A bunker underneath hell. There he stands forever in a pool of cool water, under a tree heavy with fruit. When he stoops to drink, the water drains away. When he reaches up, the branches lift out of reach. Eternal hunger, for the man who fed the gods his child.It’s where we get the word tantalize.That’s where we begin. Because this is the episode that asks a question we’ve been circling all season without saying out loud: what if the reaching is the problem? What if the morally correct thing to do is simply wind the whole operation down?In the ninth episode of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse, we sit with the most provocative idea we’ve encountered yet: that existence itself is a harm, and that the right response is not to build a successor, but to stop. Philosopher David Benatar, the world’s leading anti-natalist and author of Better Never to Have Been, makes his case with the cold precision of the analytic tradition: that there is a fundamental asymmetry between pleasure and suffering, that a person who is glad to be alive may simply be exhibiting an adaptive preference, and that having children to stave off the end is what he calls a procreational Ponzi scheme. David also, thoughtfully, sends a helpful book to Sean’s mother who is struggling to deal with her husband’s progressing Parkinson’s Disease.&nbsp;Philosopher Nolen Gertz, author of Nihilism and Technology, then clarifies what nihilism actually is: not believing life is meaningless, but living life meaninglessly — and he traces a straight line from heaven to the cloud, arguing that Silicon Valley is still doing philosophy from the 1600s. Émile Torres returns to separate two kinds of pro-extinctionism that are quietly at war with each other, and to explain why the people building our successors and the people who want us to have none may be closer than either would admit.Also with us: Dr. Michael Ferguson of the Harvard Neurospirituality Lab on what meaning looks like in the brain; Dr. Joel Gold on minds as meaning-making machines and the man who plants a tree whose shade he’ll never sit in; psychoanalyst Dr. Amy Levy, who thinks we’re complex rather than bad, and that we deserve to keep on keeping on; and Ian Gold, who happens to know David Benatar personally, and who says he hopes that on most days, he isn’t right.Plus Friedrich Nietzsche, the accidental face of nihilism, who despised it, and discussing the possibility that the singularity has already quietly begun.Tantalus is usually read as a story about appetite. But the water and the fruit were never really the punishment. The punishment was that he kept reaching. The question this episode leaves you with is whether that’s a curse, or the only thing we’ve got.The Punishment of Tantalus is the ninth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us, or something that’s already happening inside us.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comNEW: Our full long-form expert interviews are now available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Joel and Ian Gold, Émile Torres, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Mediahttps://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia&nbsp;https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia&nbsp;https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.comWondermind&nbsp;https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/&nbsp;https://www.wondermind.com/Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady&nbsp;https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/&nbsp;https://seankingogrady.substack.com/Guests:&nbsp;David Benatar — Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Cape Town / Author, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence — https://amzn.to/3TqY1cz&nbsp;Nolen Gertz — Associate Professor of Applied Philosophy, University of Twente / Author, Nihilism and Technology — <a href="https://amzn.to/4yVzNaq" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_b