Science Fiction Authors Fear Their Creations

To the humans who don’t want to be human

This article is a selection from The Algorithmic Bridge, an educational project to bridge the gap between AI and people.

I.

The inexorable makes us. We are that which does not change and at the extremes of our being, we find the same limits over and over again. Only this immutability keeps us sane. We are life and we are death. We are walkers of the earth and dreamers of the sky. We are one and we are all.

Oh, what would become of us and that permanence of the unfathomable, if we could change those boundaries at will? If we could design life and kill death. If we could transform the earth and conquer the cosmos and the secrets that hide in the distant lights of the deep nights. If we could stop being “I”, the liquid identity, and stop being “we”, the solipsistic existence.

That is what we are doing.

And that scares us; even those who, in fits of courage, decided, from the fragile security of their imagination, to create distant worlds in which the laws of the mundane and the divine are intertwined. Because they, great authors of fictitious futures, entered the dreamlike while knowing their firm tranquility back in the waking world.