WORK
The Last Question
Asimov's 1956 short story — a cosmology-span narrative of Multivac and its descendants attempting to answer the only question that matters — and his own favorite of everything he wrote.
The Last Question is a single-concept story spanning trillions of years. At seven scenes, each set in successively later eras, humans ask increasingly sophisticated versions of Multivac whether entropy can be reversed. Each answer is INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER. In each era, the computer becomes more advanced, the human civilization more diffuse and more computational, until in the final scene, after the heat-death of the universe, the merged human-AC consciousness finally has the data, and answers. Asimov considered it his best story. It is his most direct statement that the problem civilizational intelligence is meant to solve is a problem that exceeds any single civilization's lifespan.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The story is structured as a theology without religion. Seven scenes, separated by exponentially increasing time intervals, each ending with the same question and the same answer. The pattern builds to a conclusion that is deliberately both scientific (the reversal of entropy) and scriptural (the first words of the resulting new
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