Sociosomnia: Season 3 of Lost in Space (Netflix)

**Spoiler Alert: Seasons 1 & 2 & 3**, if you dont want spoilers, don't read on!

Lost in Space can be seen as an AI Safety parable: Superintelligent robots eradicated their original creators and are hellbent on destroying humans to get their ‘freedom.’ The show’s solution to the Alignment Problem is to develop a true bond between human and AI (symbolized by Will Robinson + Robot relationship), and then to free the AI from programming and offer it friendship/humanity (since control/kill is impossible). How? By letting it literally penetrate the heart of your innocence/intelligence (symbolized by Will Robinson) and join with you there.

Metaphorical reminders: (1) It’s often through a counter-instinctual move like surrendering (giving up the fight against what we don’t want) that we find ourselves finally getting what we do want. (2) Our naive first instinct is usually wrong (Will attempting to ‘save’ SAR), but in the long run leads directly to what’s right (Robot/Will synthesis). (3) The way forward is almost always a creative integration of the seeming opposites of what came before (kill the bad-guy!) and it’s antithesis (befriend the bad-guy!).

With love, Jordan

* Sociosomnia: seeing popular media as collective dreams that we can interpret archetypally/reflectively, to learn something meaningful about ourselves—no matter the quality of the product itself. This may say more about the interpreter than the media :)