Myths from the Machine, with Ken Liu
Each time we make something, it’s an utterance to the universe of who we are. Ken Liu’s Vision of technology as storytelling
“If you’re interested in the story so far, you’re bound to be interested in where it goes.”
Story telling is our compass for navigating the unknown — a bridge between the chaos and the order of our world. Through it, we create meaning to all the nonsense, and we come to understand ourselves and our conflicts, as well as our ultimate place within a universe we know so little about.
It’s the storyteller who’s something of an existential interpreter, infusing perspective into the happenstance around us and shaping our understandings of the rhythms to existence; the inevitability of change, the interconnectedness of things, the passage of time.
Today, we seem to need such interpreters more than ever, as we ascend a multitude of apexes that’ll significantly influence the trajectory of humanity.
AGI, digitized consciousness, the singularity — these are some of the plot themes to the human story that seem to be coming to a head.
Such themes are found in Pantheon, which is based off a series of short stories written by Ken Liu. The sci-fi drama follows some existential threads that come undone over the corporate uploading of consciousness, and is but a single spoke in Liu’s wheel of mythopoetic fiction.
I had a chance to pick Ken’s mind about his creative instinct to extract meaning from our interactions with technology. He seems to confirm the idea that our creations not only reflect what we are, but work to completely define us in the first place.
“I want to understand how time washes away the corruptible flesh of the ephemeral to leave behind the eternal bones”
Q: You spend a lot of time with your mind situated in both past and future tenses, and you create this coherence between ancient wisdom and future vision; what’ve you learned from being something of a creative filament between both tenses?
How does that influence your own personal relationship with, or movement through, time?
K.L: I’m a technologist by training and temperament. That might at first appear to be a good fit with being a futurist but at odds with a love for the past. Yet, I think the two are intimately connected.
I’m interested in things that last: buildings, practices, institutions, ideas. I want to understand how time washes away the corruptible flesh of the ephemeral to leave behind the eternal bones. For example, in literature, these are the questions I’m interested in: Why are some books very popular and then forgotten a decade later? Why are other books read by only a few hundred people during the lifetimes of their authors but then become part of the canon? How did Beowulf, virtually unknown to most writers of Middle and Modern English, eventually become a text studied in high schools? How did the Dao De Jing, a foundational text of human philosophy, emerge in its current form out of a congeries of competing early versions and errors? What does it mean to support literature via a market instead of patronage or other means? How are we still discovering new ways of telling stories (or at least they seem new to us at first glance) after tens of thousands of years?
Fundamentally, buildings, practices, institutions, and ideas are all forms of technology, which I define as the patterns of our minds made manifest or tangible. This may seem odd at first. But consider the roots of the word “technology”: Together, techne and logiamay be understood as “a discourse on craft” or a story about art. What is technology but the externalization of our thoughts, a narrative of forms endlessly beautiful? And craft is the practice of embodying the mind in matter, as well as the result.
Technology is a story we tell the universe about who we are. All of us, when we imagine something and then make it real, are practicing technology. So, you see, technology is our species’s grandest epic. All of my stories, whatever their superficial marketing genres — sci-fi, magic realism, historical, fantasy, techno-thriller — are ultimately stories about technology. It’s the most human story of all.
With time, many details of this story are forgotten, and only the bones remain deep mythology. Finally, my interest in both antiquity and the far future can be explained. If you’re interested in the story so far, you’re bound to be interested in where it goes.
“even uploaded, we will not be “gods””
How do you reconcile the spiritual beliefs of classical antiquity with the more modern ideals of an artificialized afterlife or a more technological eternity?
I don’t think the two are as different as they seem at first. As I explained earlier, I think of “technology” very expansively, encompassing machines as well as culture, ideologies as well as architecture. The contemporary obsession (at least among some in Silicon Valley) with an afterlife in the computing cloud as “gods” is just an evolved version of our oldest ideas about the meaning of life.
Human beings, from Zhuangzi to Edna St. Vincent Millay, have wondered at (and quite often, chafed at) the notion of “Infinity. Pressed down upon the finite Me!” Driven by life’s brevity, we yearn to become part of something grander in time and space, to escape from the ephemeral into the eternal. Whether we call that the soul or a pattern of electric signals that can persist in a non-biological substrate is immaterial; they are manifestations of the same deep impulse.
Now, some may take this and think my argument amounts to religion and spirituality being as mundane as computing. My point is actually the opposite. I’m a materialist, but that doesn’t mean I think region and spirituality are “lies.” Indeed, like Le Guin, I think true religion, mythology, and spirituality emerge from the collective unconscious, which I take to be a way for conscious material beings like us to access the deep patterns of the universe, the Truth that is too deep for mere words. I would argue that contemporary thinking on “silicon immortality” is a variation of this primal myth in the collective unconscious.
Even if we somehow manage to transfer our consciousness to silicon, which I think is not at all imminent, we will still be material beings limited by embodiment. The one prediction I’ll make — and I’m loathe to make predictions — is even uploaded, we will not be “gods,” and the mythical impulse will persist in us.
“a speculative mirror for us to see how our modernity is not the only possibility”
Tell me more about Silkpunk, and what inherent part of you holds the passion to blend technology, humanity and aesthetics. What echoes from East Asia’s classical antiquity are the loudest to you?
Silkpunk is the name I gave to the genre of my Dandelion Dynasty novels.
As I mentioned, I don’t consider myself bound by the conventions of genres like sci-fi or fantasy; all my fiction is about humanity expressing itself to the universe through the language of technology.
One turn in this human epic has intrigued me for a long time: the emergence of what we call “modernity.” This is largely the story of the Renaissance, when Greco-Roman antiquity was repurposed and recombined — given the “punk” treatment, if you will — into the building blocks of our world. This is most easily visible in the language of modernity: physics, democracy, electromagnetism, economics, chemistry … none of these words are Anglo-Saxon. They are neologisms cobbled out of Greek and Latin roots. Modernity is literally built from the repurposed ruins of classical Hellas and Rome.
Until recently, modernity outside of Europe has largely been a story of European conquest/colonization and the “Westernization” of Indigenous cultures. But why does this have to be the story? Silkpunk is my attempt to reimagine an alternative path to modernity, one constructed using the repurposed blocks of East Asian antiquity rather than the Greco-Roman past — the very project suggests the potential for reconstructing modernity using indigenous roots from all around the globe.
This is most visible in the material vocabulary of technology in the books: silk, bamboo, paper, wind and water power, lacquer … materials and sources of power important to East Asian traditions of engineering become the physical building blocks of this alternative Renaissance. But far more critical are the building blocks of ideas. The people of Dara, my fantasy archipelago, face the problems of modernity: empire, imagined communities, global trade, discovery, technological revolutions, education inequality, desire for representation, constitutionalism, concentration of power and capital … but they find solutions in their past, out of philosophical and religious traditions inspired by East Asia’s history. This is a thought experiment, a speculative mirror for us to see how our modernity is not the only possibility.
Here’s a Daoist metaphor that may help. Imagine a bowl of water. The bowl is what allows the water to be “useful” — to be carried, stored, lifted, drunk. But the bowl also constrains the water, forces it to be in a particular shape. When you are used to carrying water with bowls, you think it is the only possibility, the only way of doing things that makes sense. But what about waterskins? Or pipes? Or a little open-air duct that flows through the house? Or nothing at all, if you could have a “bubble” of water in zero gravity? These other vessels and no-vessels allow you to see the full potential of water, as well as the limits of the bowl model.
So it is with silkpunk and our modernity.
“a kind of yearning for making a thing and making it well”
As we had seen in Pantheon, emotion had been something as a fuel for creative problem solving; that there’s more to the productive process than just cold logic, and that we need the emotional dimension of our conscious capacity to propel us.
How did you come to understand this yourself and how do you use variable forms of emotion throughout your own creative process?
I think this is familiar to everyone who makes things: artists, mathematicians, writers, lawyers, accountants, programmers … There is a pleasure in the creative process, a kind of yearning for making a thing and making it well, that drives all of us to do what we do, whether it’s drafting a good contract or shaping a beautiful bowl. This pleasure is an emotion, one of the most important facets of self-actualization.
Emotions are a critical piece of how humans find meaning in what they do, and emotions not only help us pick solutions out of an infinite field of possibilities but also drive us to want to tackle certain problems rather than others. Subjectivity is at the heart of the story of technology, and subjectivity is made up of emotional experiences.
“the grand epic that humanity tells the universe and what lasts through the unceasing tides of time”
Hoping to get your comments on how you view the recent adaptation of Pantheon; do you consider the adaptation to be faithful to your original intention and did the show- runners add/modify/delete anything noteworthy? Any thematic directions that you hadn’t expected?
Pantheon tells a story that is both more and less than the seven short stories by me on which it is based (six of them can be found in The Hidden Girl and Other Stories: “The Gods Will Not Be Chained,” “Staying Behind,” “The Gods Will Not Be Slain,” “Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer,” “The Gods Have Not Died in Vain,” and “Seven Birthdays”). To turn the stories into a show, Craig had to develop new characters, new plots, and new conflicts. Similarly, he had to jettison other characters, plots, and conflicts that simply wouldn’t work well in the universe of Patheon. But insofar as the show is also about the grand epic that humanity tells the universe and what lasts through the unceasing tides of time, I consider it an excellent adaptation.
Craig and the writers had me work with them to break down the show and flesh out the characters. In addition to the elements from the stories that made it into the show, I also contributed some ideas for “hacks” and other narrative bits that weren’t in the stories. It was an absolute blast working with the team on the show, and I learned a lot about a different form of storytelling.
“at some point, AI will be able to have its consciousness”
Do you think AI will ever get to a point where it can emulate the kind of creative processes that you undertake? Will it be ever able to achieve Ken Liu levels of creativity and be able to do that one critical thing that the UI’s in Pantheon have to do do — experience love? If so, how?
I think having AI emulating humans is profoundly uninteresting.
Turing devised the imitation game as a way to work on AI without being bogged down by definitions of “intelligence” or “thinking.” However, the imitation game shouldn’t be the goal of AI.
When a new technology emerges, it’s natural for all of us to ask: “How well does it imitate what is already there?” However, the true potential of a technology is only revealed when it does things that had previously not been possible. The printing press, when it was merely copying books like monks did, was not interesting. It became interesting when it began to print pamphlets, newspapers, ephemera that wouldn’t have been possible in the slow-writing past. The motion picture, when it was merely a filmed version of a stage play, was not interesting. It became interesting when it began to tear apart the Aristotelian unities, when it led to the invention of the language of cinema to tell stories that couldn’t be told on stage, when it evolved into Breaking Bad and TikTok. Similarly, AI that merely imitates human novels, paintings, films, etc., is of no interest at all (except to capitalists, but who cares what they think?). What is the AI equivalent of the leap from slow books to fast newspapers? The leap from filmed stage plays to actual cinema? When AI enables humans to create things that they couldn’t before, to create new mediums, new forms of art, new ways of seeing and experiencing the universe, then it will be interesting.
Now, as for AI being creative on its own. Despite all the hype about AGI being just around the corner, I don’t consider that to be likely in the near future (and certainly not along the lines of the kind of generative AI we’re building now). This obviously depends somewhat on what you mean by “creative.” I hold the view that it is entirely possible for a human being to have an aesthetic experience with something that has no creative intent inside it. For example, Chan practitioners have been contemplating interesting rocks for millennia, and why would it be any different for us to enjoy something made by mindless AI? In these cases, the “creativity” is supplied by the consuming audience in interpretation, not by the crafting algorithm.
However, at some point, AI will be able to have its consciousness and experience of the universe. In those instances, assuming AI wants to create art and that we can understand it, it will be a transformative experience. I very much look forward to that.
Will such artificial consciousnesses experience love? Will they have emotional faculties as beyond us as the electroreception of sharks and rays or the 12-chromatic- photoreceptor vision of mantis shrimp are beyond our sensory faculties? I have no idea, but I would love to learn from them.
“each time we make something, it’s an utterance to the universe of who we are.”
What’s the more accurate statement to make: you seem dedicated to infuse some sense of soulfulness into the cold shell of the technological/mechanical world, or you work to cast a spotlight on the innate soulfulness that is already somehow/somewhere in there?
The latter is closer to how I see the world. Human technology is an expression of human nature, much as a beehive is an expression of bee nature, and a spider web is an expression of spider nature. I don’t think technology is cold or empty — no more than books and paintings and myths are cold or empty. Each time we make something, it’s an utterance to the universe of who we are.
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More of Ken’s work via his website: https://kenliu.name
His current works THE GRACE OF KINGS (the Silkpunk book) and THE HIDDEN GIRL AND OTHER STORIES, which contains the Pantheon stories.
Coming October 2025 is Ken’s anticipated near-future techno-thriller, ALL THAT WE SEE OR SEEM
