The Hidden Girl
Yesterday, I went to a webinar featuring Ken Liu, in which he talked about the value of stories. According to Liu, stories are maps for what it means to live a good life, to be fully human.
As humans, we are guided by a need for self-definition and self narrative. We want to be surrounded by objects of meaning, to know that we made a dent in the universe or brought joy to someone’s life. Liu argues that this kind of tangible, “putting ourselves out there into the world” is at the core of storytelling and technology. Writing is a technology we invented to share our thoughts, and technology is about putting our cognition out into the world. We are continuously trying to make sense of our lives by telling a story of who we are and how we came to be. We make our values real by enacting them and turning them into stories.
So unlike the other authors I’ve enjoyed recently, like Ocean Vuong or Chen Chen, it’s not the writing in The Hidden Girl that makes it so beautiful, but the ideas encapsulated within the text. It’s the intricacy of the narrative, the thought experiments each story represents. These stories hover in an uncanny valley of being fantastic enough to strike fear and real enough to be plausible. After all, singularity is not a question of if, but when. As I raced through these stories, I found myself pondering questions about morality and mortality.
A criminal who murders may still be a good father, husband, brother, and son - must we punish the whole person? Can we separate a person from his or her crimes? To what extent is each of us more than the worst thing we’ve done? (“The Reborn”)
How accurate is photographic representation? Can we substitute an online conscience for reality? How much should social media companies moderate content? Should they have the power of arbiters of truth and decency for an entire society? (“Thoughts and Prayers”)
How we can continue to make the world a better place when policy is tempered by realism? Can we commoditize suffering for a noble goal? (“Byzantine Empathy”)
When we do reach singularity, what is the right way to live, and what is the right way to die? Does the authenticity of our messy existence, including pain and suffering, make us human? (“Staying Behind”)
Reading The Hidden Girl once again helped me appreciate technology as an artistic process of taking existing tropes and putting them together to solve new problems. This is the message Liu left his readers with at the webinar: “Engineering is the most important art we know how to practice as a species, a way to explain to the universe who we are. But in the end, storytelling is how we give ourselves hope, the strength to climb up and to keep on going.”