Six Gutenberg Revolutions in a Row Ken Liu Ada Palmer Beatrice Erkers

Two science fiction authors imagine the future.

Ada Palmer is a science fiction writer and historian. She teaches early modern European history at the University of Chicago, and her Terra Ignota quartet, beginning with Too Like the Lightning, imagines the world of the 25th century. Ken Liu is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer, the author of the Dandelion Dynasty series and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, and most recently the author of All That We See or Seem, the first novel in his new series.

I direct the Existential Hope program at Foresight Institute, where we work on circulating more constructive visions of the future. I wanted to know what two people who build worlds for a living think human flourishing would actually look like, and why our imaginations keep sliding toward empire and catastrophe instead. They ended up talking about work far more than I had expected, and about the assumptions underneath it, some of them 2000 years old. I also left with a new term I plan to spread: the Etsy economy.

This interview has been edited for clarity and includes follow-up questions from Asterisk editor in chief Clara Collier.

Permanent crisis

Beatrice Erkers: There’s a trend right now in Silicon Valley of reaching for historical analogies, especially the Renaissance and the age of empires. Why those periods, and why now?

Ada Palmer: Right now, everybody feels like the world is in a state of crisis, and when the world is in a state of crisis, we tend to look at other time periods, both past ones and imagined future ones. You see enormous interest in both past and future during and after the French Revolution, when everyone is suddenly wearing clothing that’s a reproduction of what they imagine ancient Rome looked like. You see the same in the Renaissance, which is also a period of crisis, in the aftermath of the Black Death. History is a wide palette of alternatives that people reach for as a tool to help them understand our world in times of crisis.

The narrower answer is that the periods tech people keep invoking are the ones we associate with disruptive technology. When we talk about the Renaissance, we usually attribute its growth to technology. Tech people love to compare what’s happening now to a Gutenberg revolution. They love to think that a new technology they're creating is going to accelerate historical change. Just as the Middle Ages were supposedly stagnant and then we suddenly had a period of acceleration toward modernity, they imagine we're in a period of acceleration toward an exciting science fictional future that’s just around the corner. And the 19th century, another age of empire, is the other age we strongly associate with technology, via the Industrial Revolution.

There's also the fiction problem. We have an awful lot of science fiction and fantasy about empire, because empire is easy to write about. The power is in the hands of a few characters. It's very big, but it's also very dramatic. It's much harder to write fiction about a complicated plural republic with 52 interlaced political offices and everybody coming from complicated, slightly middle-class backgrounds. Just try writing fiction about the European Union and you will figure this out. So when people look back to history dominated by technology, and forward to futures dominated by technology, they're seeing a lot of models of empire.

Ken Liu: I agree with all that, and I'd add that there's an element of justification going on. When history is invoked, it’s often a way to explain and legitimate exercises of power. When Venice was trying to become a great city, it went to Alexandria to steal the body of St. Mark, so that it could prove itself a great Christian city. When people think they’re making great transformations, it can seem a little scary, and one way to legitimate it is to say: Historically, things happen because they’re inevitable. You can complain about what I'm doing all you want, but I’m just an agent of history.

Ada: We’re all aware of the type of history we call Great Man theory of history, which centers all agency in a couple of heroized figures, and which we've been trying to move away from. But one of the biggest types of history people turn to instead is Great Forces history, in which everything is giant gears grinding, and as soon as there's a certain amount of torque in the system, the machine tips. That’s an important analytical tool. But just as much as Great Man history, Great Forces history erases agency for everyone, except perhaps economists, who get to believe they’re wielding the great forces.

Ken: That’s my favorite version: Economics as storytelling with numbers.

Ada: And if you don't have a choice in the thing you're doing, if it’s an inevitability, that’s one of many ways to accept it and justify it, both to others and to yourself.

Beatrice: How much of this is really about AI, though? That’s the revolution Silicon Valley believes it’s living through.

Ada: I think we’re wrong to separate generative AI and call it a completely new revolution. I often talk to Silicon Valley people who want to ask, are we so special that we’ve had six Gutenberg revolutions in a row, 10 years apart? And I say no, we're having one Gutenberg revolution: the computer.

The personal computer, the internet, the cell phone, social media, and generative AI are all iterations of the same one fundamental technological change, the same way Gutenberg’s press kept having new impacts for decades through news networks, pamphlets, and eventually the newspaper. A little too much of our analysis of Silicon Valley right now is of the past five years instead of the past 20.

Beatrice: Ada, when I interviewed you before, you mentioned that Petrarch could imagine political change but not the end of disease. And what happened instead is that we ended a lot of diseases. What’s our version of that blind spot?

Ada: He thought it would be easier to defeat the Dire Horseman War than the Dire Horseman Plague. And we've found that in fact we’ve made more progress against the Dire Horseman Plague than against the Dire Horseman War. Some of the STEM problems have proved easier than some of the social science problems.

We’re not entirely missing this, but you constantly hear people encouraging STEM, STEM, STEM while diminishing the humanities and the social sciences as partners, whereas people who are really deep in it, who are scientists, understand there’s a symbiosis: We don’t make progress by funding just one of the three. There’s a perception that wealth flows toward technological innovation, rather than recognizing that wealth flows toward lots of kinds of innovation, only some of which is technological.

Ken: I don’t want to focus so much on Silicon Valley, though. The problems we have today don't stem from a few people or a few inventions. They have their roots much further back, in what I’d call the gradual mechanization of humans.

Take AI displacing jobs. This is not something that happened in the last five years. We’ve been creating the conditions for it for a century or more. If you worked in customer service 40 years ago, you were a respected professional. Over time we turned those into scripted jobs. Once you’ve gotten things to that point, it's not very difficult to throw the human out and put in a language model. It’s not the model that caused this. It’s that we've been making humans behave more and more like machines, up and down the chain: devaluing work, taking the meaning out of it, turning it into a mechanistic process where you're a cog performing what your role demands. The pushback Silicon Valley is getting now is the tip of the iceberg. What’s really being expressed is a much deeper loss of meaning, dignity, and participation.

Ada: I’ve been using a simile lately for when people say generative AI is causing problem X, when we've been talking about problem X since before the 1980s.

You’ve filled your refrigerator for the first time with something weird, synthetic meat, say, and the refrigerator is straining. Meanwhile there’s a guy behind the refrigerator hitting it with a sledgehammer, and he's been hitting it for weeks. But somehow everyone’s blaming the new substance rather than the fact that there is a guy actively dismantling the refrigerator from behind. There have been active dismantlings of worker strength, solidarity, unions, skill, and employee rights, systematically, for decades longer than generative AI has existed.

Beatrice: So what should we be moving toward? What does a flourishing direction actually look like?

Ken: We should not be thinking about this in terms of preserving the status quo against disruption from AI, because the status quo is terrible. We should be thinking much harder about how to restore meaning to people’s lives.

In the last few generations, most of us have become used to tying our identity to our employment. When we fight to preserve jobs, we’re treating a job as two things at once: an economic means of support and a source of meaning. We need to separate them, and think about how people find meaning outside gainful employment: from connection with other people, from a sense of control, from a sense that we make a difference.

Why do so many people repeat, as though it were proven, that not all of us can be artists, singers, poets? Says who? Surely there are ways for all of us to live a life of meaning without being employed or paid for it.

Ada: This is something I think about a lot. Classic science fiction that engaged with the future of automation kept producing the same few visions. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, quite a few writers advanced the thesis that if mankind didn't have to work, everyone would commit mass suicide: Work was the only thing keeping humanity from self-destruction. There’s the vision of the machines rising up, the Frankensteinian robot, The Matrix. And there's the vision of humans living in paradise domes making art and philosophy all day while robots do everything else. Notice that last one assumes that, liberated from work, humans will only want to do very elite, high-status activities. Art and philosophy, not gardening and taking care of injured bats.

But look at our present: There are so many meaningful vocations people would love to do and don’t, because meaningful vocations are economically exploited. We don't pay teachers. We don’t pay people who do social work, or care for the environment, or rehabilitate injured seagulls. We don't pay our artists and actors much, except a very few. A lot of people, given a steady paycheck to live on, would much rather work at the bat sanctuary.

Another future I enjoy playing with is: What if the future is the Etsy economy, where we all make beautiful handcrafted bespoke things and buy them from each other? Maybe you enjoy drawing pterodactyls, maybe crochet. Everybody enjoys making and doing things. A future where we all make and do things and purchase them from each other is a beautiful future.

Ken: That’s my low-art future. Not everybody has to become a bestseller. You can make things for a few people, and that can be very satisfying. Or the future in which staying home with your kids as a dad is a perfectly respectable, meaningful thing to do. If you want to stay home and teach your kids and play games, why the heck not, as long as you find meaning in it.

Ada: And if anyone says that doesn't contribute to humanity: You’ve raised kids, and they're going to go contribute to humanity. We know good, supportive parenting produces happier, more creative, more generative kids. But it’s another kind of labor we devalue, partly because it’s historically coded female, like childcare, elder care, and teaching generally. If we simply make sure everyone can have a living no matter what they do, a lot of people have things they would love to go do.

Ken: Decouple remuneration from the status of the work you do, and things will look very different.

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