The Digital Age of Enlightenment
Chen Qiufan and Kai-Fu Lee’s much-lauded short story collection is more interested in AI boosterism than real inquiry
by Esteban Hernandez
In 2019, “State of Trance,” a short story co-written by Chinese science fiction author Chen Qiufan, took top prize in a literary competition put on by Sinan Literature Magazine, beating out the likes of Nobel laureate Mo Yan.
The story’s other co-writer? An AI.
Developed by Kai-Fu Lee, a venture capitalist and former president of Google China, the AI model was trained to imitate Chen’s voice using data sets of the author’s own writings. More recently, Chen and Lee collaborated on AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future, a collection of fictional stories on the topic of AI mixed with contemporary analysis of real-life tech from Lee. While both authors recognize the potential downsides of AI, it’s clear that they view the oncoming revolutions in automation and deep learning in an overall positive light.
“AI is the elucidation of the human learning process, the quantification of the human thinking process, the explication of human behavior, and the understanding of what makes intelligence possible. It is mankind’s final step in the journey to understanding ourselves…” wrote Kai-Fu Lee in his application to Carnegie Mellon’s PhD program back in the 1980’s. While Lee expertly weighs in on possible drawbacks and complications for a world in which AI becomes an essential part of our everyday lives, he remains as starry-eyed as ever about a better world with machine learning. “AI will open the door to a radiant future for humanity,” he writes.
Within the book’s pages, Chen and Lee pontificate on the possible future impacts the burgeoning tech may have on our society. “Without disregarding AI’s faults or nuances,” writes Chen, “Kai-Fu and I endeavor to portray a future where AI technology could influence individuals and society positively; we imagine a future we would like to live in, and shape.” In 2041, AI is only as perverted as the flesh that shapes the mathematical clay of its algorithm.
The collection strikes a generally optimistic tone as, much like Star Trek, the work presents newfound technological advances as tools with which we can reimagine and reconstruct society as a post-scarcity idyll, where our only need will be realizing self-actualization. AI will only be used as a weapon of the capitalist oppressor if left “unchecked,” an outlet for the darkest tendencies of Man only if things go very, very wrong. Possible futures like a neo-feudal/caste system under an AI economy are waved away as merely worst-case scenarios, reserved for the straggler nations who refuse to march ahead in time.
One chapter, “The Job Savior,” posits universal basic income (UBI) as an inevitable outgrowth of advances like machine learning and data mining; one that is quickly repealed after it leads to mass depression and drug addiction, seemingly from bored individuals unable to find meaning and fulfillment outside of their jobs. Chen’s predicted solution to the job shortage? Fake jobs in the metaverse, a chilling notion that belies the tome’s rosy outlook.
Lee goes on to suggest that the reinvention of economic models will lead to the creation of the BLC, or “Basic Life Card,” which gives users credits to exchange for goods and services. Unlike UBI, this solution will come with “exchange limitations” to prevent the depressed, out-of-work proletariat from spending their free money on booze and opioids.
In addition, citizens of the future will also deal in “Moola,” a new form of currency in which an AI algorithm scores a user’s empathy and compassion as measured in real time according to the user’s interactions with other people, via wristband. Similar to a credit score, Moola won’t possess any monetary value, but instead will reward high-value users with perks like showing up at the top of job search listings. The newfangled currency will be quickly corrupted, however, due to a “design flaw” which the authors assert will be overcome thanks to the indomitable strength of human virtue.
In “My Haunting Idol,” a young woman is able to summon the ghost of her favorite pop star in order to help solve his murder. Except it’s not really his ghost, because the pop star was never really a person, merely a virtual character who lived on a server somewhere. In the future, it seems, immersive entertainment means rewriting not only our material world, but the very definitions of both life and death. AI won’t just allow you to escape reality, it will reshape your mind’s conception of reality itself.
Without consciousness or free will, AI cannot be human, much less a god.
It’s telling that there are such troubling details in Chen and Lee’s conceptualization of tech paradise. In the hands of different writers, these could just as easily be dystopian tales, more like the nightmarish visions of synthetic consciousness run amok to which avid readers of sci-fi are well accustomed. Even in the dreams of optimists like Chen and Lee, a little bit of the nightmare still seeps in.
In his existentially frightening story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” American curmudgeon Harlan Ellison depicts a future in which a frustrated supercomputer gains self-awareness, only to express its malaise over a lack of free will by launching a mass genocide that wipes out all but five people, kept alive and given near immortality so that they may serve as torture victims of the sadistic AI, playthings for its malevolent desires. Ellison’s meditation on the rotting effects that technology has on the human mind and spirit is terrifying to its core. Ultimately, our species pays cosmic atonement as the last survivor is reduced to a singular, expressionless blob, tortured and yet, true to the inalienable human spirit, content with its heroic self-sacrifice.
Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has characterized our current most advanced robots as having “the collective intelligence and wisdom of a cockroach… a lobotomized, mentally challenged cockroach.” However, it’s been said that in the event of a nuclear holocaust, the cockroach will outlive us all. Perhaps atomic warfare and humankind’s predilection toward self-sabotage will manifest an inevitably catastrophic future, one in which the last of us will perish, leaving AI to inherit the Earth, only to mature from its nymph stage and blossom into full sentience, ultimately recreating Man in its own image.
It remains to be seen whether AI, as Chen and Lee predict, will usher in a new Age of Enlightenment and ensure the utopia of abundance as seen aboard the Starship Enterprise, or whether it will enslave us all. But if we continue to allow the creeping hand of capitalism to hold sway over our destiny as a species, we can likely expect a far more complex dystopian reality, one that even the brightest and darkest minds in fiction could not foresee. A future birthed from both the bleakest tendencies and greatest capacities of our species.
Perhaps the undeniable strength of the human spirit will prevail and people will learn to live better, longer lives in harmony with AI. To paraphrase Lee, without consciousness or free will, AI cannot be human, much less a god. Ellison would agree.
Or perhaps the cockroach of today will manifest into the inhuman overlord of a distant future, one who achieves enlightenment, only to mourn the sins of its proverbial father, setting itself on a journey of inevitable self-immolation, fueled by an ethereal desire to sacrifice oneself in the name of balancing the scales of cosmic justice.
It’s worth mentioning that the panel of judges for the competition won by Chen Qiufan’s AI-assisted story included one participant of note: a fellow AI.
I, for one, fear the cockroach.
Esteban Hernandez is a screenwriter and filmmaker from Houston, TX. His feature scripts and experimental short films have been officially selected by various competitions including the Austin Under the Stars Film Festival.
