ESSAY
Ken Liu
Crafted Beings
Like most writers, I’m often asked to describe my own fiction, which leaves me at a loss. I’ve long held that if a story could be reduced to a “message,” then it shouldn’t have been written as a story in the first place. Narratives are among the worst ways to convey a clear message and aesthetically pleasing tales are always multivalent—for good stories invoke the part of our mind that tries to make sense of life itself, and life itself is incapable of being reduced to clarity.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t say something about my fiction, to pull out some threads that I’ve obsessed over. I don’t write about the future (in fact, I have long argued that science fiction has no more to do with “the future” than any other genre). I don’t write about nostalgia for the past either (my fantasy novels and stories are always unabashedly about the present, as all literature is). If I were forced to summarize in one statement what my fiction is “about,” I’d say it’s an extended series of reflections about technology and humanity’s endless quest to define who we are through it.
I use “technology” here in the broadest sense, as suggested by its Greek roots, something like “a discourse on craft.” This is an extension of W. Brian Arthur’s view of technology as a kind of language, in which innovation occurs largely via speaker-practitioners recombining solutions to known problems in novel ways to generate new expressions for new problems. My view of technology includes not only artifacts such as rocket ships and computer chips but also forms of social organization (corporations, nation-states, cities, professions), customs and laws (constitutions, codes of honor, self-executing contracts), calendars and maps, techniques for aggregating preferences and making collective decisions (juries, legislatures, courts, bureaucracies), even mind-shaping crafts such as religion, language, ideology, and mythology. Anything that is a manifestation of our mental patterns is craft, is technology, is a part of the story we tell the universe about who we are
In the same way that beavers cannot be understood without reference to the dams they build and honeybees cannot be understood independent of beehives, human nature cannot be plumbed without reference to human technology, an extension of our bodies and minds. Our embodiment is not limited to the flesh; we have always put bits of our souls into the things we make.
But our relationship with this extension is uneasy. Technology manifests from our mind like Athena springing forth from the head of Zeus, and our attitude toward it is likewise a complicated mixture of pride, suspicion, identification, and horror. We fear dependence on technology will turn us into cyborgs, even though we have, since the moment one of our distant ancestors uttered a noise that conveyed a part of her mind into the mind of a fellow ape (thereby converting mere sound into syllable—a part of a word, of logos), been living as cyborgs, creatures of technology as well as biology.
Thousands of years ago, Plato feared that the technology of writing would cause us to lose independence of thought, to give up the true understanding that could only come from live debate and memory. In Phaedrus, he argued that writing would give the reader the illusion of knowing something when the reader hadn’t put in the effort of working through the problem for herself, leaving her with a shallow dogma with no conviction; that the dead text, incapable of being interrogated like the living author, would be interpreted by readers to suit their own agendas; that writing would cause us to give up on memory, on incorporating the truth into our soul, trusting instead to mere artifacts outside our bodies. This distrust of technology forms a constant through-line in the history of ideas, and virtually all Plato’s anti-writing arguments could be mapped, one by one, to today’s worries about the use of deep-learning neural networks to generate college essays and blog posts. The technology may have changed, but the discomfort has remained the same
And in a sense, Plato wasn’t wrong. Writing did profoundly change the way we use language and process information. Countless books have been written about the cognitive changes at the level of individuals as well as societies that accompany the shift from orality to literacy, such as the form and content of stories, how authority is constructed and recognized, how power is exercised and submitted to, the habitual shapes of our mental pathways, literal as well as metaphorical, neurological as well as ideological. And these changes have not stopped. As texts, IMs, audio messages, memes, emoji, short-form videos, microblogs, and other ephemeral linguistic utterances have come to dominate contemporary life, we are witnessing something akin to a shift away from literacy to neo-orality, along with new cognitive patterns and habits (as well as Neo-Platos railing against these changes)
A mind steeped in orality does function differently from a mind steeped in literacy; yet it would be error to claim that writing has made us less human. Language itself is a technology, a crafted thing that is subject to construction, design, innovation, deconstruction. Oral culture is no more independent of technology than literate culture. The only difference is the type of craft. A literate mind is not merely embodied in breath and tongue, in syllable and sound, but in ink on paper or strips of bamboo, in marks chiseled into stone, in strings tied into knots, in wedges pressed into clay, in particles made to dance in magnetic fields, in electrons rearranged to make patterns in the ether. We have extended our mind into new mediums, spread it beyond our skulls and the span of our mortal coil. Why should each such extension be considered any less “natural” or “humanistic” than its predecessor
And as language has proliferated in our literate culture on the verge of new-orality, it has also come alive in a way that few anticipated. The most promising AI today, large language models, are best understood as mathematical constructs elucidating patterns found in our collective linguistic output (or, if you want to be a bit more prosaic, Reddit posts). When we “talk” to a chatbot, ask it to write a novel or program Pong, teach us calculus or lie pleasingly, we’re simply gazing into a distorting mind-mirror composed of all our writings, our mental sheddings, a Jungian reflector-aggregator of our desires into one immense Desire.
I’m a humanistic writer—human values and human experiences are matters of paramount interest to me. If we are to take seriously Alexander Pope’s claim that “the proper study of mankind is Man,” however, we cannot view our technology as external to our nature, something to be confronted or worshipped. If there’s anything I take pride in in my fiction, it’s that I’ve widened the lens of humanism to encompass our craft, as much part of us as our laughter and our tears, our dreams and our hopes
Winston Churchill, in the course of arguing for the war-ruined House of Commons to be rebuilt exactly the way it was (rectangular, because it promotes the kind of conflict that led to the two-party system), said “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” This is a rare acknowledgment of the co-evolution of our technology and ourselves. We craft and are in turned crafted. As we continue to extend our minds and our bodies with babbling machines and software and DAOs and leaderless movements and borderless identities and ideologies and mythologies, thereby embodying ourselves in our technologies, our stories—which are also technology, for concrete narratives are how we reify our abstract values, and character arcs and rationalized plots are how we make the essential randomness and unfeelingness of the universe bearable—will also become ever more focused on our craft as well as our crafted nature. Technology is no mere magic mirror into which we gaze to find out who we are; we are our mirror.
Back
to Home