Ted Chiang

If the biologists win this race, if we actually succeed in building conscious, highly capable wetware, the ethical implications are utterly terrifying.

There is a concept from the brilliant science fiction writer Ted Chiang, which he wrote about a few years ago, that I cannot stop thinking about in relation to this.

He wrote, suffering precedes moral agency.

It is a devastatingly profound observation.

Oh, it's so good.

Yeah, I think it's a Ted Chiang had a more robust take on this idea.

But, you know, I don't think Frank was trying to go that deep with this story.

I think he wanted to do a fun twist and he wanted to play around with a goofy ass meathead character who loves nuking things.

Science fiction has a reliably disinterested kind of satirical detachment, a cold but a laughing eye cast down on the foibles of self-serving humans on the planetary surface below.

So strongly do I agree with Arendt about the importance of this kind of attention that I even prick up my ears when science fiction writers like Ted Chiang of Arrival fame turn to nonfiction.

When he sounded a prescient early warning about LLM's limitations in early 2023 and unleashed another polemic on the delusion that AI models like Anthropocene Claude are approaching consciousness, he was clearly drawing inspiration from a long tradition of science fictional skepticism in the face of purported novelty.

However, the more carefully I read Leo's encyclical, the guiltier I felt for my knee-jerk anti-popery.

And perhaps that is the point.

There are as many cautionary responses to AI right now as there are serious people mulling the topic.

The best writers, from Leo to Ted Chiang, proceed from wildly divergent angles.

Science fiction's Manipian satires offer one way to see around AI.

entertainers and actors and so we just wanted to pay a

little tribute to some of them it was my pick of the month so the book that we are going to be discussing this month is one of my favorites and I think most of us really liked it so stick around to hear us talk about Ted Chiang's exhalation

And stick around right till the end because it's my pick for next month and it is a crowd pleaser.

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So he's published one in 2002 and then another in 2019.

However, he has had a lot of critical acclaim.

A Hollywood movie was made about his books, and anybody who's into sci-fi has heard of Ted Chiang and his short story collections.

So for my pick, I selected Exhalation, which was his 2019 collection of nine different stories, very different stories.

Yeah.

Um, so famously, you know, there's The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang.

Um-

Yeah, that was the first thing that came to mind for me.

For the bonus audio archive, China discusses it and reads an excerpt from it for us.

And this joins many contributions from past guests, from Ted Chiang reading an essay of his on what is behind Silicon Valley's fear of superintelligent AI, to perhaps the most outside-the-box contribution, something Johanna Hedva created just for us, recording their moans, groans, screams, and written texts city to city while on book tour, and then mixing and layering them with the universe's own voices, the sonifications of a black hole and of the Helix Nebula, raw audio of the sun, a field recording of the Aurora Borealis.

This is an experience only Hedva could have created, and they called it The Saddest Thing of All is When a Lone Astronaut Falls in Her Suit, Who is There to Help Her Up? These join many others, from N.K.

Jemisin to Daniel José Older to Carmen Maria Machado to Naomi Klein.