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.
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.
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*
This is one of those stories, just like the SR-71 "ground speed check" story, that every single time I see it posted I just have to read the entire thing again. I love it.
You better watch out. When my evil twin feels y'all aren't upvoting my posts enough he thinks "let's do a search for articles that have gotten 200+ votes at least 5 times in different years" [1] It's a highly effective strategy that I know dang doesn't like!
So I'll post another article about robot grippers which you should upvote instead of the breathless "AI will give us more Nobel Prize winning research" posts because: (1) robots that can change bedpans and pick strawberries really will change the world, and (2) they give out a certain number of Nobel Prizes a year and AI won't change that.
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.
"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
An absolute classic! Was just telling a buddy about this one the other day while talking about The Egg by Andy Weir (another short story I really enjoy). Every time I read this one, I get chills at the end. Asimov really was a master.
It's amazing that in the late 1930's, someone with his academic credentials and intellect decided his life would be best spent writing science fiction.
I looked this up on Wikipedia. It seems that he was working as an instructor (not a professor) of chemistry; since he was making more money as a writer during that time, he slowed down or stopped his research. Doesn’t seem to have been an intentional choice so much as how things happened to turn out.
> he was working as an instructor (not a professor)
No he eventually became a full professor too.
"He began work in 1949 with a $5,000 salary(equivalent to $68,000 in 2025), maintaining this position for several years. By 1952, however, he was making more money as a writer than from the university, and he eventually stopped doing research, confining his university role to lecturing students.[g] In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his lack of research. After a struggle over two years, he reached an agreement with the university that he would keep his title and give the opening lecture each year for a biochemistry class. On October 18, 1979, the university honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of biochemistry."
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.
Considering AC could persist indefinitely in hyperspace while interacting with normal matter, the answer would appear to be "hyperspace", whatever that is.
I remember the first time I heard this story. I was maybe 7 at a planetarium and they animated it with music little hand drawn starships and retro computers floating among the stars. They turned the stars all out for the final scene.
(It's a video game that does a brilliant job touching on similar themes to The Last Question. If you liked The Last Question and can fit a video game into your life, you will probably like Outer Wilds. Warning: if you start searching for "outer wilds," the algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you. Progression in the game is gated behind knowledge, so this is worse than usual. If you have trouble resisting the temptation to google past a rough description, it's a sign you should just jump in and play it. End recommendation.)
"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 :)
I wasn't expecting to find my favorite short-story on HN today! That's a pleasant surprise! This is how I started my journey in reading Isaac Asimov, I really recommend it!
A classic. It was dramatized by the Rochester NY, USA Museum of Science as a planetarium show, and I saw it there about 1974 with my father. Great times.
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
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.
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
My favorite short story of all time. Between this and Deep Thought in HHGttG, I couldn’t believe the prescience when the bitter lesson was learned and LLMs and GPUs started eating the world.
the LLM parallel does hit different on this read multivac says insufficient data across ten trillion years and the whole story is basically if more compute and more data eventually gets you there. what's weird is the story answers yes, not on any timeframe that helps the people asking tho.
feels uncomfortably close to the actual situation where the models keep getting better and the answer keeps being "not yet, ask again later" while the answer is getting ready years late
I feel like the software running multivac represents something vastly more advanced than today's LLM.
I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.
For a while I thought I really liked sci fi novels and short stories, and maybe that's somewhat true. But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular. Other writers in the genre are more hit or miss. Can anyone recommend other writers that are on his level?
It wasn't until I discovered I was on the spectrum that I realized why it clicked so much. >.< I'm masking all the time, running conversational simulations to anticipate the societally-expected response to any given situation (and am high on the IQ spectrum).
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.
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.
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
>> 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.
A Fire Upon The Deep is a fantastic novel for programmers to read, and I think the prequel A Deepness In The Sky is even better. There are some amazing old-school coding jokes in there, like that everyone thinks the universal time counter started at the first moon landing, but programmer archaeologists know it was really 15 megaseconds later.
Neal Stephenson's work is outstanding in my opinion, although some find it polarizing. My favorite of his is _Anathem_, followed closely by _Seveneves_.
Iain Banks's science fiction novels (mostly set in the Culture, but he does have others) are also great.
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.
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.
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."
I love this story. When I first read it online in college many years ago I was surprised, and disappointed, when I suddenly realized it was a short story. It's a great one to recommend to people.
Outer Wilds, the video game, does a brilliant job expanding on this theme if you're hungry for more. "There's more to explore here."
Warning: progression is gated behind knowledge so spoilers are worse than usual and The Algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you if you start poking too deep into "outer wilds" searches. If you like The Last Question and can fit a game in your life, Outer Wilds is a solid bet.
>INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER
Boy, it sure would be nice if real LLMs were capable of giving an answer like that.
I reckon that’s how we know we’ve hit ASI.
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.
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.
2061, mark the date
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*
Did a human write this?
I would guess a real human, one with a good sense of humor at that.
Woosh
No Information before. No information after. This is not a failure — it's narcissism as a service.
This is one of those stories, just like the SR-71 "ground speed check" story, that every single time I see it posted I just have to read the entire thing again. I love it.
You better watch out. When my evil twin feels y'all aren't upvoting my posts enough he thinks "let's do a search for articles that have gotten 200+ votes at least 5 times in different years" [1] It's a highly effective strategy that I know dang doesn't like!
So I'll post another article about robot grippers which you should upvote instead of the breathless "AI will give us more Nobel Prize winning research" posts because: (1) robots that can change bedpans and pick strawberries really will change the world, and (2) they give out a certain number of Nobel Prizes a year and AI won't change that.
[1] old issues of Byte magazine are a good bet: try https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-05
As usual, labor saving is only a good idea if the wealth created is distributed throughout society, not redirected to a small group of people.
And it almost always is through cheaper products to the end user.
Agreed. Don't forget the "Can't send emails farther than 500 miles" one, too [0]:
0: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
More Magic:
https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html
I love this one. I thought it was old when I first read it, and today I realised that was 36 years ago!
Not quite tech or sci-fi, but for me it’s https://www.eternal-flame.org/library/oldlibrary/georgebusin...
Is that the origin of the Sean Connery dragon movie, Dragonheart?
For more reading, see also: https://web.archive.org/web/20250719141310/https://dbrgn.ch/...
I'm a bit proud of having suggested the author to add the 2019 entry (thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678).
Hopefully there's another repo of Internet stories somewhere else?
For those curious -> https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...
How about this one?
https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue4-8.h...
Yes! Thanks for posting! This gives the feel of what my career looked like in the 80s and early 90s.
That was an awesome read. Thanks.
Once I discovered that the SR-71 Ground Speed Check is most likely not true, it doesn't hold the same weight for me anymore.
Way too many unlikely variables all lining up, and no other accounts of the story from all of the people (pilots, air traffic controller, etc) supposedly on the frequency.
Don't tell me the "dreaded 7-engine approach" also isn't true!
Who knows, but there isn't a whole story with details behind it to make someone think is.
A short anonymous joke that may or may not be true is better than a long story that is almost certainly made-up by someone in authority.
For me it's "The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans", which is often quite problematic.
I loved reading that. Why is it problematic?
Probably because actual people died.
I am guessing because it takes hours to read.
People will be reading this story for ten trillion years
"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
An absolute classic! Was just telling a buddy about this one the other day while talking about The Egg by Andy Weir (another short story I really enjoy). Every time I read this one, I get chills at the end. Asimov really was a master.
It's amazing that in the late 1930's, someone with his academic credentials and intellect decided his life would be best spent writing science fiction.
He had an academic career too, becoming a tenured professor at age 35 at Boston University. Writing just paid better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#Education_and_car...
I looked this up on Wikipedia. It seems that he was working as an instructor (not a professor) of chemistry; since he was making more money as a writer during that time, he slowed down or stopped his research. Doesn’t seem to have been an intentional choice so much as how things happened to turn out.
> he was working as an instructor (not a professor)
No he eventually became a full professor too.
"He began work in 1949 with a $5,000 salary(equivalent to $68,000 in 2025), maintaining this position for several years. By 1952, however, he was making more money as a writer than from the university, and he eventually stopped doing research, confining his university role to lecturing students.[g] In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his lack of research. After a struggle over two years, he reached an agreement with the university that he would keep his title and give the opening lecture each year for a biochemistry class. On October 18, 1979, the university honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of biochemistry."
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.
Totally agree, that ending sticks with you for a long time. Asimov had a way of making simple ideas feel massive.
> 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.
Lots of good comments over the years -> https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%09Isaac+Asimov%3A+The+Last+Questi...
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.
I remember the first time I heard this story. I was maybe 7 at a planetarium and they animated it with music little hand drawn starships and retro computers floating among the stars. They turned the stars all out for the final scene.
Outer Wilds vibes! I love it!
(It's a video game that does a brilliant job touching on similar themes to The Last Question. If you liked The Last Question and can fit a video game into your life, you will probably like Outer Wilds. Warning: if you start searching for "outer wilds," the algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you. Progression in the game is gated behind knowledge, so this is worse than usual. If you have trouble resisting the temptation to google past a rough description, it's a sign you should just jump in and play it. End recommendation.)
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?
I... Think you just spoiled me. Somehow I've managed to avoid all information about it so far, but now that you said it's like the last question...
It's on me for procrastinating playing the game for so long, it was bound to happen.
"Similar" is doing substantial work. If this is your only clue, it is likely to mislead you for at least 50% of the game, and I strongly suspect you will have fun anyway :)
this sorta comes up very very early in the game tho
I wasn't expecting to find my favorite short-story on HN today! That's a pleasant surprise! This is how I started my journey in reading Isaac Asimov, I really recommend it!
A classic. It was dramatized by the Rochester NY, USA Museum of Science as a planetarium show, and I saw it there about 1974 with my father. Great times.
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
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.
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
My favorite short story of all time. Between this and Deep Thought in HHGttG, I couldn’t believe the prescience when the bitter lesson was learned and LLMs and GPUs started eating the world.
the LLM parallel does hit different on this read multivac says insufficient data across ten trillion years and the whole story is basically if more compute and more data eventually gets you there. what's weird is the story answers yes, not on any timeframe that helps the people asking tho.
feels uncomfortably close to the actual situation where the models keep getting better and the answer keeps being "not yet, ask again later" while the answer is getting ready years late
I feel like the software running multivac represents something vastly more advanced than today's LLM.
I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.
maybe 42 was just the end of sequence token...
My favorite "explanation" of that answer is that 6*9=42 in base 13.
God's numbering system is "unlucky".
It only takes understanding the exponential function and some imagination, right? Apparently an uncommon combination of traits in people ;)
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
I tried to ask ChatGPT the same question last year. Unfortunately it didn't give me a meaningful answer.
That’s because it’s a DC, not an AC.
For a while I thought I really liked sci fi novels and short stories, and maybe that's somewhat true. But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular. Other writers in the genre are more hit or miss. Can anyone recommend other writers that are on his level?
Ted Chiang is the greatest living science fiction short story writer I'm aware of, and ranks highly on my all time list.
His short story "Understand" is just... amazing.
It wasn't until I discovered I was on the spectrum that I realized why it clicked so much. >.< I'm masking all the time, running conversational simulations to anticipate the societally-expected response to any given situation (and am high on the IQ spectrum).
https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infini...
I second this. Exhalation for some reason really resonates with me.
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.
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.
Try "The Illustrated Man" by Ray Bradbury, but skip the terrible frame story. The actual short stories are beautiful literature and canonical sci-fi.
As someone who loves the Big Three (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein) and have read a lot of SF, I pretty much despise Bradbury. There’s no science in his science fiction.
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
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...
>> But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular.
A less commonly mentioned Asimov book that I really enjoyed and will read again is "The End of Eternity". If you've not read it, the ending is IMHO amazing and unique.
Last Question reminds me of it because of the style.
I was also quite fond of Palimpsest by Stross. It’s a retelling of EoE but a more modern treatment (and the writing is quite a bit better, IMO)
Stanislaw Lem, if you can handle something a little more poetic and less strictly hard sci-fi.
Becky Chambers - Wayfarer series and several enjoyable short stories/novellas. Low on blasters, high on sentient life in all its many forms.
I mean.. a genre can't be all hits, that makes no sense :P
If you want good sci-fi a good list can be:
- Ender's Game
- The Martian + Project Hail Mary
- A Fire Upon the Deep
- Dune
A Fire Upon The Deep is a fantastic novel for programmers to read, and I think the prequel A Deepness In The Sky is even better. There are some amazing old-school coding jokes in there, like that everyone thinks the universal time counter started at the first moon landing, but programmer archaeologists know it was really 15 megaseconds later.
Neal Stephenson's work is outstanding in my opinion, although some find it polarizing. My favorite of his is _Anathem_, followed closely by _Seveneves_.
Iain Banks's science fiction novels (mostly set in the Culture, but he does have others) are also great.
The Expanse series starting with Leviathan Wakes.
(I second Ender's Game, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary.)
Though Dune is highly acclaimed for its concepts, I couldn’t quite get into it personally.
They’re just too dry for my tastes.
- Hyperion
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.
And then read Asimov's The Last Answer, good dichotomy of stories.
I like the concept, has anyone tried this in production?
Running it now but don’t have sufficient data to make a recommendation yet
Somehow never read this one. But did write a short story ~20 years ago with a similar arc. I guess reading a lot of Asimov and Clarke and others will do that to you.
You should. It's short and it's one of Asimov's best.
I did! That is how I know the arc is similar.
okay so i'll be the sole commenter of: hex.ooo is an incredible domain name to me, maybe because i dig its UI, but certainly just in general
didn't know about ooo, maybe because it's not available on namecheap!
It's an awesome name.
If you go up one level, you can see this story is one entry in a great library of stuff:
https://hex.ooo/library/
In a similar vein: https://calumchace.com/favourite-relevant-sf-short-story/
Check out "The Last Answer" from the same author.
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."
All time great short story. Has shaped my world view since I first read it many years 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.
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.
Claude Mythos
[reference] [reference]