Visionary Storyteller
Science fiction, in tension between two worlds
I’ve been reflecting about this term, science fiction writer. Of course, I started as a sci-fi fan for all of those classic Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Star Wars, Star Trek. And it’s all very scientific in a way. And in China, we put it in an even more scientific way. It has to be very [inaudible 00:00:33] about science and based on facts and knowledge we’ve known and is written in the textbook maybe. But now it feels to me like what I try to do is something more than that, something across the boundaries, something interdisciplinary, something even about spirituality and mysticism and because I think science fiction in a way is the modern myth. So it try to explain the world in a different way, in a scientific and technological way, but I think that’s not enough, so because there are so much we don’t know about ahead of us.
So during all this conversation and journey and exploration with scientist, thinkers, philosophers and artists around the world, so I think basically we need to build up some new narratives which couldn’t be captured in a very narrow perspective of science fiction. I try to use my writing to expand the concept of science fiction. Maybe I’ll call it something later, but now it’s kind of difficult to get rid of that label because the publishers, the marketing people, because that’s how people categorize you, got to put this label of genre on your books and put on a specific place on the shelves and it’s easy to sell. But I think it’s quite limit what you’re doing and what you’re thinking about.
So this is what I try to tell myself, “You are basically storyteller.” What is so unique about science fiction is it’s interconnected, different discourses from the scientific and technological perspective but also from the humanity perspective. And it’s something between fictional and reality and it’s something about the past and the future because we talk about all the things happen in outer space or otherworldly, but basically we’re representing, reflecting the present, the human condition right now. So this is something unique about science fiction. It’s not science or fiction. It’s something in between, the space, the tension, the punctuation between two worlds.
Global consensus versus nationalistic frameworks
At the end of the day, we are still trapped in this national state framework of thinking. We have our own interest party. We have our own people. We have different class. We have hierarchy. So all the things determine that we couldn’t get on certain kind of consensus, even if we can build on some very basic understanding, some framework. And something is bad. Of course climate change is doing harm to the people and it’s getting even more challenging. But what is the plan? What is the action? This is more to the core because it requires sacrifice on economy, on recruitment, on human labor, on whatsoever, tradings. It’s all part of the globalization. But that means you have to sacrifice a piece of my share. And this is where all the conflicts came from.
The singularity century and how AI may unite us
We are just at the very beginning of the paradigm shift. We’re already living in singularity. It’s not just a single spot in time, but it’s a period of transition. Maybe it is a century of singularity, but maybe afterward when we look back into history, we just realize, “Oh, that happened already there. We just didn’t realize it. We just didn’t recognize it in that way.”
Because we were living it?
Yes. Basically it. So people living in the big times, they didn’t realize it. So a lot of assumption was made afterwards and by the historians. And I think right now we’re in that paradigm shifting moment. And all of those arguments, battlings will be a very extremely interesting part of the history. And basically I’m the one who observing all of those people. And I think I would love to have them in my stories because this is so real. This is so lively. And this is something I really love to represent, the different, even fragmented reality in understanding AI. So right now we just have the conference, the declaration in UK. All these big players, they have agreed on something, on the regulation framework internationally.
So we can foresee coming that AI might be the thing that can reunite us human as a species, as a civilization together. So this is so important because always in history, when you look back in time, we need some false enemy. Right now, we need something so distinguished from human, so the other, the others, they’re so different from our own kind, but this is what threatening us. Maybe it’s not for real, but we need that kind of thing. We need that kind of external crisis to push us to unite as one. Again, in Chinese, crisis can be translated into two characters. One is [foreign language 00:07:08], is crisis, and another is [foreign language 00:07:12]. It means opportunity or chance. So in Chinese [foreign language 00:07:17], crisis always means two part of the reality. So it’s very deeply embedded in our nature. We see one crisis or, again, it’s an opportunity to save us.
Learning to imaginize the future
Name of my website is called Imaginize World. What would you just in a sentence or two say if someone said to you, if I say to you, how do you imaginize the world?
There’s one sentence in the book, AI 2041, is, “To create the future we want to live…” How to say the word?
I have your quote here. I think it’s, “With every future we wish to create, we must first learn to imagine it.”
Yes. So I mean, imaginize the world is something not taken for granted. You have to learn it first. Naturally everyone knows how to imagine. You have to use your human parts, like your embodied experience, your childhood memory, even your family history and your intrinsic responses of the surroundings, like the emotions, even those reaction beyond languages. I think those are the most important part, even those you couldn’t fully recognize and understand yet, for example, your dreams or even non-consciousness is basically the core of imagination. So imagination is not driven by logic or reasoning. It’s driven by something even more deeper than we can understand. So I think you need to train, just like a vessel, just like all this data, information getting through you and through your interface. They might have some reactions, just like a melting pot, is like some alchemy processing. So some gold, some diamond, some crystal, something might emerge from there, and you never know what it is. That’s the beauty of imagination.
