Han Song: Living in the age of science fiction

On January 11-14, 2022, the "Tencent Technology for Good Innovation Week" jointly sponsored by Tencent Research Institute and Tencent Sustainable Social Value Division was held. Science fiction writer Han Song delivered a keynote speech entitled "Survival in the Age of Science Fiction" at the conference.

The following is the full text of the speech:

Hello everyone, I'm science fiction writer Han Song.

I want to talk about my view of the world from a science fiction perspective. Probably not, because science fiction is often thought of as a toy to coax small children to sleep. But now there are more people who pay attention to science fiction. For example, some real estate developers said that they wanted to build the community into a science fiction style, some people said that they should add science fiction elements to the city transportation card, and the boss of the stone business also found a science fiction writer to help with exhibition design. Some entrepreneurs and even government officials say they are science fiction fans, Beijing is transforming steel factories into science fiction industrial parks, Dunhuang city has just held a science fiction festival under the Buddha statue, and Nanjing is busy creating science fiction movie business cards for the ancient capital.

For example, today everyone sacrifices precious time to listen to me talk about science fiction, which has never been done before. Of course, in my opinion, these have something to do with the fact that there is no new subject matter in reality, and this is the case in the metaverse.

But there may also be a reason, that is, reality is becoming more and more sci-fi. A lot of what science fiction describes happens in reality. For example, if you go home and shout, there will be a robot to sweep the floor for you, and there will be a robot at the hotel to meet you, and it will even soothe your travel emotions. You can navigate to a remote and unfamiliar place with your phone, and your child can sit at home and watch astronauts take physics lessons in space.

For example, overnight we live in a world made up of masks, and if we don't stop doing nucleic acids, everyone is treated as a potential patient. Ten years ago I wrote in the science fiction novel Hospital: "Not only have our cities become hospitals, but the whole planet has become hospitals." "If one day we are treated like patients no matter what we are doing, what kind of world will it be?" This scene seems to be becoming a reality.

In the past year, many strange things have happened. For example, the subway of a provincial capital city will flood and drown people, and running a marathon will kill a group of people. More than a billion people have never seen drones live elephants entering the city before, millions of people have encountered the first time in their lives to pull the gate and cut the power, and some people have sold tens of billions of yuan of goods in one night of online live broadcasting. Esports seems to be replacing sporting events and film and television shows as a new species.

So sometimes I feel as if living in a future world, something that should have happened tomorrow comes early tonight.

Why is that? Someone turned to science fiction for answers. Science fiction was born in the 19th century in Britain, the country that started the technological revolution and the industrial revolution. It is called the myth of the age of technology, and it focuses on the future of humanity. It corresponds to a new geological epoch, the "Anthropocene", in which human beings have become the main factor influencing the course of earth's history, rather than nature. Humanity is changing the trajectory of the future, and the future is no longer gradually coming through the old path. Humans are causing ecological destruction and biological extinction, and the possibility of human extinction is increasing. Based on the mastery of atomic energy, subparticle structure, and biological genetic code, for the first time in the past hundred years, human beings have created technical means that can destroy themselves and the earth.

Out of concern for the future, human beings have found a new means of science fiction to think about their own destiny. As the name suggests, science fiction includes science, representing logical reason; including fantasy, representing imagination; and it is expressed in art forms such as novels and movies, rather than formulas and papers, representing sensibility, but people who engage in art are often crazy. So the metaphor of science fiction is that we live in an era where rationality and sensibility, normalcy and madness, reality and the future are most intensely intertwined. The characteristic of our time is science fiction, and technology has become the first reality, and at the same time it is full of all the hallucinations and even disillusionment that have never been seen before.

In such a new era, the logic of science fiction needs to be paid attention to. This is because, when technology and the future become the key words, it is no longer enough to focus on the logic of martial arts, which is the theme of the agricultural era.

Science fiction has several logics:

The first is to create new concepts. The inventions of our modern life are all derived from science fiction concepts at the earliest. Science fiction predicts mobile phones, the internet, artificial intelligence, and self-driving cars. The concept of the metacosm was first proposed in science fiction. The post-human concept also comes from science fiction, which refers to the docking of man and machine, or the bioengineering transformation of man. The mobile phone has effectively become a new human organ, just like the eye trachea and liver. Genetic technology transforms the human body, allowing people to live longer and even become superhuman. New concepts derived from relativity and quantum mechanics have become tools to lead or shape the future.

Faced with the reality of science fiction in general, it may be necessary to establish two laboratories, one is a technology laboratory and the other is a thought laboratory. I think that's also what technology is about good. Goodness is the ability to think independently and propose new concepts of what no one has to have when drastic changes occur.

The second is to create new wonders. The old spectacle could be the clouds of Mount Everest, the aurora borealis of the North Pole. But the new spectacle is man-made. For example, metal machines that are hundreds of millions of times faster than the human brain integrate billions of transistors in places as big as dust, and space vehicles that are tens of times faster than sound, replacing the star chains of the starry sky and the base on the moon and Mars.

The more powerful spectacle is something called dreams, and science fiction has been competing from the beginning to the ability to make dreams. When Lu Xun introduced science fiction to China, he said that it is the difference in dreams that determines the difference in the future. This means that there are higher demands on imagination. Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge, and it is becoming more realistic today.

We went to urban and rural primary schools and found that there was a gap in dreams between urban and rural teenagers, not just a gap in knowledge. Whether or not a new spectacle can be created depends on what kind of magical dream you have, that is, on the right to define and speak about the future. The answer to the question "What is tomorrow's humanity" will determine everything. How to cultivate curiosity, playfulness and imagination in the next generation, so that their brains are more important than ever, is the secret of innovation and greater goodwill.

The third is to create a new world. Science fiction has created four new worlds:

One is the world of time freedom, where time can be accelerated or compressed, and even time travel can take place. Technology can also create a feeling directly in the nervous system, making it feel like an hour has been lived for centuries and experienced many times.

The second is the world of space freedom. We have the ability to go to distant interstellar space, or we can create new nanoscale spaces, or transform traditional human spaces, such as imagining folding up cities and inhabiting different classes of people, or splitting up Planck space and relocating too many people.

The third is the world of digital freedom, that is, people can move freely in the virtual space, and people's digital bodies are omnipotent and have new life.

The fourth is the world of free will, that is, technology has released the potential of the brain, liberated self-consciousness, and enriched the spiritual world of people as never before.

All science fiction takes place in these four new worlds, and all creations and inventions are fragments of these four new worlds, and the essence is to seek the four freedoms and create new aesthetics at the same time. British science fiction writer Clark said, what to do in outer space? It's not just about digging a few mines on extraterrestrial planets, it's about seeing how beautiful the universe is, so as to stimulate our desire and potential to survive. The best products are artistic, like Jobs's Apple phone, and then technology. The premise of goodness is beauty. So it's important to have the ability to build the world out of the air. It is said that some companies have a new career or a new position called a worldview builder. But the question is, is it possible for us to create a fifth new world outside of these four worlds? What exactly is it? There are no answers or clues yet.

New concepts, new wonders, new worlds, are the utopias that are coming. Capital, technology, products, and traffic are all flocking to these three directions. The reason why we have trouble sleeping every day is that we desperately want to find new concepts, new wonders and new worlds in reality, and quickly realize them.

But the age of science fiction has another logic:

One is delay. Whatever science fiction predicts, most of them will become reality, which is the difference between science fiction and magic, but it often appears later than predicted. For example, science fiction predicted that human beings would achieve freedom of navigation in the solar system in the early 21st century, but this moment did not come. Science fiction predicts that we will live in a world full of intelligent robots, and it seems that there is still a distance. Science fiction has long described the Internet of Things, 3D printing and flying cars, and these have not come as expected or failed to achieve the desired effect. It can be expected that physical survival, rather than virtual survival, will be the number one problem in our lifetimes. The demand of ordinary people for basic necessities rather than sophisticated technology is still increasing. Therefore, be cautious about your dreams, and the more lively you say, the more careful you should be. Sometimes not doing it, or doing it slowly, is also a kind of goodwill.

The second is uncertainty. The futuristic world described by science fiction is uncertain and unstable, subject to chaotic effects and nonlinear laws, as in Jurassic Park. A small component problem can subvert the whole big machine. Science fiction depicts the endless possibilities of the future, and nothing can be taken for granted that it must be. Science fiction writers prefer to maintain a habit of thinking about what would happen if this were the case, considering the most extreme scenarios. Why does science fiction always depict some Frankenstein? Because when new things are born, they first produce a bunch of fools, liars and lunatics. Most of the lunatics will go bankrupt, will be locked up, or will commit suicide, and a few lunatics will persist until the end to become winners.

The third is incompleteness. Science fiction depicts an extremely colorful future world, while exposing great scarcity. For example, thinking that with big data, it is as if everything is under control, which is underestimating the complexity of the universe. Like the science fiction novel "A Guide to the Galaxy", the answer to the universe calculated by the supercomputer is a mysterious "forty-two" that no one can understand. The unknown we face is far greater than what is known. We will survive in a huge information asymmetry for a long time, and it is possible that whoever has more information is more dangerous, because others will see him as a threat. In science fiction, even a god-level civilization cannot have a complete chain of production that controls the universe alone, so instead of trying to create and control everything, it is about trying to maintain a balance and build a chain of trust between the environment, others, and some unspeakable force. This requires greater goodwill and as little hostility as possible.

The fourth is vulnerability. As the science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem describes, nothing is powerful, and you can be replaced, disappeared, and evaporated at any time. Something unexpected can break through a seemingly powerful castle. One virus can change all habits. Science fiction has long predicted the fragility of smart cars, and recently in exercises, hackers can easily break into the autonomous maneuvering system of smart cars, replacing drivers and passengers, which raises difficult questions about how to define traffic accidents. In the future, all areas related to smart machines will encounter the same problem, from drones to medical equipment. The new living environment is that machines are becoming more and more like people, and people are becoming more and more like machines. The so-called goodwill is to remain humble and careful everywhere.

Fifth, it is transient. On the one hand, immortality seems to be coming, and at the same time, the life cycle of many things seems to be getting shorter and shorter, from the stars of perfect people, to large-scale technology or real estate companies, from a technology, to an industry, and even civilization. As science fiction writer He Xi described in "Exotic", everything enters fast-forward mode, producing monsters while producing new things, and the most important thing that technology needs to fight is precariousness. Taking care of the aftermath is sometimes more important than creating something new. The metaverse is more like a Rome, where eternal life is delusional. What replaced the metacosm was already in the brew at the time of the metacosm's arrival.

I think that delay, uncertainty, incompleteness, fragility, and ephemerality constitute the characteristics of the science fiction era. The so-called goodwill is to prepare for the upheaval of the times. Science fiction writer William Gibson, the originator of The Matrix, said the future has arrived, but it's not yet popular. It can now be modified to mean that the future has arrived and is all the rage.

For thousands of years, people's lives today have been determined by what happened yesterday, and to consider what to do now, we must read the "History" and "Zizhi Tongjian". But things have changed. Today is determined by tomorrow. Insight into the future is the way to control the present. Here I would like to tell you the news that just at the end of December, China's Chengdu City defeated Nice in France, Memphis in the United States and Winnes in Canada to win the right to host the 81st World Science Fiction Convention. This is the second time the World Science Fiction Convention, founded in 1939, has visited Asia, last in Japan in 2007. This will be the first time that the most imaginative people on the planet have gathered in China to discuss the future and destiny of mankind in the era of science and technology. Some foreigners say that in order to understand the future of China, we must understand China's science fiction and know the future of the world.

But I also feel that there are difficulties in this regard, because recently reality has become more sci-fi and has begun to exceed the prophecies of sci-fi. This is worth noting. What COVID-19 challenges is actually the human imagination. I suspect that the future may become an independent life, not according to human arrangements, but in its own way to accelerate the invasion of reality, and fundamentally modify and even subvert reality. Similarly, technology is an independent life, which has gained the ability to evolve autonomously away from human manipulation.

Technology is used to change the future, but the future may not want to be changed. In some cases, whether we can survive in the future depends on whether the two major forces of technology and the future can have good intentions with each other. This tests human ingenuity and luck.

Finally, I wish you all a new year's dream come true.