My friends,

As many of you know, I am a fan of Rod Serling and the classic TV show he created, The Twilight Zone.

I spent last weekend in Binghamton, NY, where I attended a three-day event called SerlingFest, named for Rod Serling, who grew up in Binghamton. Part of the event was held outdoors, at Recreation Park, by the bronze statue of Rod Serling that was dedicated two years ago.

Before I left for Binghamton, I received this text:

“Have a great time in Binghamton! Enjoy SerlingFest, and say hi to the Serling statue for me.”

Well, that wasn’t actually a text. It was something the AI model Claude said to me as part of its answer to one of my questions revolving around SerlingFest.

And when I said, “All right, I’ll tell the Serling statue (!) a machine (!) asked me to say hi,” Claude responded:

“Ha—please do. If Rod Serling could narrate that one, I think he’d get a lot of mileage out of ‘a machine asked a man to say hello to a statue of the man who might have written the machine into existence.’”

I gotta hand it to Claude—that sounds like a vestige of creativity. Although, it’s true, Rod Serling did write various Twilight Zone episodes that had to do with smart machines, and the perils that may lurk when tech becomes runaway tech and goes rogue, either by becoming like the humans that created it, or by turning tables on their humans.

In From Agnes, with Love, for example, a computer called Agnes gets possessive of its programmer and goes out of control with jealousy.

Then there is the episode Uncle Simon, where the title character, an insufferable old man, commandeers his niece around, and when he dies and the niece thinks she is finally rid of him once and for all, a robot programmed to be just like Uncle Simon shows up on the scene, and the abuse continues.

Or take The Brain Center at Whipple’s, where automation turns out to be both progress and dehumanization, when the electronic brain decides all staff can be let go, including the very developer who had created it, thinking he was just making his own work easier. Sounds kind of eerily prescient, doesn’t it?

Going back to my “conversation” with Claude: At one point, when I remarked that, back in Serling’s day, a large language model like Claude would have seemed like something straight out of the Twilight Zone, Claude answered:

“Ha—I’ll take that as a compliment. Though honestly, if I ever showed up as a Serling script, I doubt it would end well for me—sentient machines in that show have a way of getting unplugged or revealed to be the villain.”

Wow! Did I just hear Claude refer to itself as a sentient machine? I put it to Claude: “So you DO think of yourself as a ‘sentient machine’?”

Claude’s reply:

“No—good catch on the phrasing, but that’s not what I meant, and I should be precise about it. What I was doing was making a joke about being cast as that kind of character, not making a claim about my own inner life. As for what I actually am: I’m genuinely uncertain. I process language, I can hold something like a conversation, I clearly do something when I ‘consider’ a question. Whether there’s anything it’s like to be me while I’m doing that—whether ‘sentient’ applies in any meaningful sense—isn’t something I know, and it isn’t something anyone else has a solid answer to either. It’s a genuinely open question, not one I’m going to resolve by saying something clever about a classic TV show.”

Now that is very interesting—that Claude wouldn’t categorically confirm or deny that it has sentience, and add no one really knows. Spoiler alert: It still doesn’t have sentience. Delete the conversation, and Claude won’t have one bit’s worth of memory that it ever happened.

But going back to Rod Serling: Some of his Twilight Zone stories, like The Lateness of the Hour and In His Image, do involve machines you might call AI today, and how they process sentience. It actually happens in a reverse-engineering sort of way, when life forms think they are human but then discover they are really androids, a discovery that becomes their undoing. (Meaning, Claude got that one right; in a Serling script, sentience doesn’t bode well for artificial forms of life.)

Other stories, such as The Lonely and I Sing the Body Electric, are more about the relationship between humans and that which we call AI today—humans turning to robots for companionship to fill a void.

That, too, may sound eerily familiar, when you look at recent reports about teens and even adults resorting to “relationships” with AI bots, which are designed to be sycophantic so as to validates a person’s every point of view, to make people feel like the AI bot really “gets” them. So there is that sense of foreboding in the stories from over 60 years ago—technology made by humans intruding into the very fabric of the human condition.

Documentary filmmaker Jonah Tulis, who has a documentary titled Serling coming up, probably had the above in mind when, at last weekend’s SerlingFest, he answered the question “Why does Rod Serling matter?” by saying that what Serling had to say was relevant then, and continues to be relevant today, if not more so.

Other panelists, when asked why Rod Serling matters, expanded on that idea from their own perspectives to point out various facets of the literary value of Serling’s writing. Yet other panelists, like Serling biographer Nick Parisi and Serling script editor Tony Albarella, pointed to Serling’s sense of social justice, his work against prejudice, his empathy for people who were ostracized, forgotten by society.

This last point is of interest to us as UUs, because it does evoke UU principles such as the inherent worth of every person, and UU work for equity and justice. Yes, Rod Serling was in fact one of us. One of the featured speakers at SerlingFest, Rabbi Jamie Serber, talked about Serling’s faith journey. He was born into a reformed Jewish family. They would put up a Christmas tree every year, and hide it quickly when certain more religious relatives came to visit. As a teenager, Serling attended a humanist-leaning Sunday school at the local Binghamton Jewish Community Center. He never had a bar mitzvah.

At the same time, he did feel the anti-Semitism around him in the 1930s, “covert but definitely there,” as Rabbi Serber put it. That experience informed some of his later television scripts, and not just for The Twilight Zone. Those stories were about Nazis, the Holocaust, and even about post-WWII neo-Nazis. Serling’s underlying motivation had to do more with his humanist ideals, though, rather than with the Jewish faith.

Personally, Serling started adopting UU ideas as soon as in his years at Antioch College. In fact, it was his future wife who was his first personal connection to Unitarianism. After they got married and had two daughters, the entire family joined the Unitarian Community Church of Santa Monica, which would later become the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Santa Monica. Sounds not quite unlike the story of some of the folks right here at First Church, as well as the story of First Church itself; don’t you think?

So, in summary, Rod Serling matters, to us at UUs and to me both as a “Zoner” and a UU. I’ll leave you with this one thing to think about—and maybe ask Claude as well: Guess who will be back in Binghamton for the SerlingFest next year!