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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Considering AC could persist indefinitely in hyperspace while interacting with normal matter, the answer would appear to be "hyperspace", whatever that is.
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
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
"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
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.
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."
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
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 90.7 ms ] threadI 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.
didn't know about ooo, maybe because it's not available on namecheap!
Boy, it sure would be nice if real LLMs were capable of giving an answer like that.
Maybe hackernews is becoming reddit...
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.
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.
Asimov's Multivac at least had the dignity to wait.
Considering AC could persist indefinitely in hyperspace while interacting with normal matter, the answer would appear to be "hyperspace", whatever that is.
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
EDIT: actually I see that the link historically posted here more often is now dead: multivax.com/last_question.html
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