While Isaac is known for his optimism about humanity and the future, he does touch on some unsettling ideas from time to time.
- "Gods & Monsters: Space as Lovecraft Envisioned it" delves into the Cosmic Horror Story view of the universe and how it might work from a realistic perspective. He concludes that the collapse of such civilizations might not come from their destruction by dark and hungry gods, but an overwhelming nihilism that leads them to ask what the point of it all is. Doubly so if it turns out interstellar colonization is not feasible, as a society watching each of its attempts blink out one by one might drive them further toward self-destruction.
- "Terrifying Aliens" discusses the Blue-and-Orange Morality associated with other species' instrumental goals and how we might find many of them disturbing. His conclusion, however, is that the scariest possibility is that, in our quest to expand into space, use technology to improve our lives and collaborate with other species, we might become something far more terrifying."Civilization, after all, is a thin veneer and our world has shown time and again that civilization's morals and ethics aren't fixed. Our alien interactions could result in us becoming the very monsters that are the stuff of our current nightmares. We probably need to be less terrified of aliens, be they benign or malignant, and more terrified of what we will ultimately become if we ever encounter them. Happy Halloween!"
- In "Crazy Aliens", Isaac discusses the idea of an Eldritch Abomination and, while he doesn't consider the idea evolutionarily likely, one possible origin for such a being might be an AI that goes truly insane. Left stewing in its own thoughts and repeating the same arguments again and again, it might conclude that sentience is a curse or that free will is an illusion before inventing a goal for itself: killing everybody. All of this is played over an image of red text shifting from computer commands to "All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy."
- "Is a Technological Singularity Inevitable?" discusses some of the key issues with the idea of an intelligence constantly improving itself, and how you can't simply slap new hardware onto existing architecture and expect it to be smarter. For example, if you replaced all the neurons in a human brain with versions that transmitted information at light speed, you wouldn't make a superintelligence. You'd make a gibbering wreck of a person, experiencing years worth of subjective time in every second, screaming as they realize, even if they managed to put a gun to their head, it would feel like hours for the bullet to work its way into their brain.
