Crafted Beings

Crafted Beings Ken Liu (bio) 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 [End Page 145] 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

Bioethics and Human Rights Issues · Digital Media and Philosophy · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction