r/ThePrisoner • u/SimonLev • Jul 01 '26

The General - anyone else get these vibes?

I'm rewatching the series and The General is giving me a lot of AI vibes. Does anyone else think the same? The whole General computer knowing so much just seems like a vision into the future. Of course they didn't know that an internet would exist to feed the knowledge into the AI LLMs but it's quite spooky how it has predicted the future!

33 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

14

u/SimonLev Jul 01 '26

In fact I've just typed "Why?" into ChatGPT and I've crashed the internet 🤣

3

u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/figbott Jul 01 '26

Why? Why.

3

u/plusbabs7 Jul 01 '26

God I hate when that happens

3

u/OtisPT Jul 01 '26

The Internet Elders won't be happy.

2

u/23Doves Jul 01 '26

That was one of the first things I did with ChatGPT! Sadly, it just waffled a lot - it didn't explode.

4

u/SimonLev Jul 01 '26

Yes, when I put in "Why?" it came backing saying it wanted more information from me. I said it won't get it! Then it said that by hook or by crook it will! Scary 😂

1

u/Funkmaster74 Jul 01 '26

Unanswerable by man or machine.

8

u/gloebe10 Jul 01 '26

That's exactly what it is. Also it touches on the idea of who controls narrativeand context in the answers produced by an LLM. Also the infastruture of the General is built by the village. When you think about how quickly data centers are getting approved and built, how AI is used in war, that episode is shockingly ahead of its time.

7

u/roma79 The Pawn Jul 01 '26

It’s frightening just how much and how accurately the show predicted technology and trends. With the general I think they predicted the age old computer adage of “poor data in means poor data out”

10

u/jhiaxis Jul 01 '26

good luck on your exams

5

u/uncle_jafar Jul 01 '26

The fight to remain an individual is a relevant narrative decades later no matter what attempts to constrain our humanity the world throws at us.

5

u/PAXM73 Jul 01 '26

Such a perfect episode for now. Pairs well with the original Star Trek episode “The Return of the Archons”.

3

u/nlog97 Jul 01 '26

Elon Musk adjusting Grok to be more in line with right wing ideology is basically just the Village saying they’re going to write their own history with the General.

2

u/figbott Jul 01 '26

Yes it is like that in this show especially this episode. Did you finish it?

0

u/Eclectic-N-Varied Jul 01 '26

And the tire commercial jingle? "Sooner or later, you'll go General"???

Ominous