This interview is part of The Rules We Live By, a series devoted to asking what it means to be a human living by an ever-evolving set of rules. The series is made up of conversations with those who dictate, think deeply about, and seek to bend or break the rules we live by.

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“ONCE IN A WHILE,” Ted Chiang tells me, “an idea keeps coming back over a period of months or even years. […] I start asking, is there an interesting philosophical question that might be illuminated by this idea?” To read Chiang is to experience a master world-builder critically exploring philosophical questions in new ways—from how we should care for an artificial being to what would be the consequence of having a perfect record of the past.

Lately, Chiang has trained his eye on artificial intelligence. And Chiang’s takes haven’t gone unnoticed. In a conversation I had earlier this year with computer scientist Melanie Mitchell and psychologist Alison Gopnik, they each referenced Chiang when searching for the right framework to discuss AI.

Chiang has a knack for descriptively illustrating his points. For example, when discussing whether LLMs might one day develop subjective experience, he explains: “It’s like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words ‘Baby don’t hurt me’ on them. It doesn’t matter if the next version of the printer can print out those stickers faster, or if it can format the text in bold red capital letters instead of small black ones. Those are indicators that you have a more capable printer but not indicators that it is any closer to actually feeling anything.”

For me, the essence of Chiang’s work, however, isn’t his critical take on technology. It’s his humanism—the way he brings to the fore the mundane reality behind existential questions and moments of societal change. It is perhaps for this reason that his work resonates with so many.

In our conversation, we discuss how Chiang picks his subjects, the historical search for a perfect language, the state of AI, and what it would take for Chiang to become hopeful about the direction of technology.

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JULIEN CROCKETT: The idea for this interview came from a conversation I had with computer scientist Melanie Mitchell and psychologist Alison Gopnik, in which they referenced your work when describing the state of artificial intelligence and its possible futures. Why do you think scientists and engineers look to your work to explain their own?

TED CHIANG: I was actually surprised that my name popped up. I think it was mostly just a coincidence that you interviewed two people who have found that my work resonates with their own. They might be outliers, compared to scientists as a whole.

What about the other way around—has scientific progress had an effect on the direction of your work?

I don’t think there has been a clear impact of recent scientific research on my fiction. My stories are mostly motivated by philosophical questions, many of which are not particularly new. Sometimes the way I investigate a philosophical question is inflected by recent developments in science or technology, but the recent developments probably aren’t the motivating impulse.

Your stories cover a wide range of topics, but I see a through line in your focus on how humans react to societal change—whether it’s a discovery that mathematics is actually inconsistent, as in your 1991 story “Division by Zero,” or a world where we raise robots as children, as in your 2010 novella The Lifecyle of Software Objects. What draws you to a topic?

Most of the time, when ideas come to me, they leave my attention very quickly. But once in a while, an idea keeps coming back over a period of months or even years. I take that as a signal that I should pay attention and think about the idea in a more intentional way. What that usually means is that I start asking, “Is there an interesting philosophical question that might be illuminated by this idea?” If I can identify that philosophical question, then I can start thinking about different ways a story might help me dramatize it.

Why is science fiction the best vehicle for you to explore ideas?

The ideas that most interest me just lean in a science-fictional direction. I certainly think that contemporary mimetic fiction is capable of investigating philosophical questions, but the philosophical questions that I find myself drawn to require more speculative scenarios. In fact, when philosophers pose thought experiments, the scenarios they describe often have a science-fictional feel; they need a significant departure from reality to highlight the issue they’re getting at. When a philosophical thought experiment is supposed to be set in the actual world, the situation often has a contrived quality. For example, the famous “trolley problem” is supposedly set in the actual world, but it describes a situation that is extremely artificial; in the real world, we have safeguards precisely to avoid situations like that.

What role does science play in your stories? Or, asked another way, what are the different roles played by science and magic in fiction?

Some people think of science as a body of facts, and the facts that science has collected are important to our modern way of life. But you can also think about science as a process, as a way of understanding the universe. You can write fiction that is consistent with the specific body of facts we have, or you can write fiction that reflects the scientific worldview, even if it is not consistent with that body of facts. For example, take a story where there is faster-than-light travel. Faster-than-light travel is impossible, but the story can otherwise reflect the general worldview of science: the idea that the universe is an extremely complicated machine, and through careful observation, we can deduce the principles by which this machine works and then apply what we’ve learned to develop technology based on those principles. Such a story is faithful to the scientific worldview, so I would argue that it’s a science fiction story even if it is not consistent with the body of facts we currently have.

By contrast, magic implies a different understanding of how the universe works. Magic is hard to define. A lot of people would say magic definitionally cannot have rules, and that’s one popular way of looking at it. But I have a different take—I would say that magic is evidence that the universe knows you’re a person. It’s not that magic cannot have rules; it’s that the rules are more like the patterns of human psychology or of interactions between people. Magic means that the universe is behaving not as a giant machine but as something that is aware of you as a person who is different from other people, and that people are different from things. At some level, the universe responds to your intentions in a way that the laws of physics as we understand them don’t.

These are two very different ways of understanding how the universe works, and fiction can engage in either one. Science needs to adhere to the scientific worldview, but fiction is not an engineering project. The author can choose whichever one is better suited to their goals.

Your work often explores the way tools mediate our relationship with reality. One such tool is language. You write about language perhaps most popularly in “Story of Your Life” (1998), the basis for the film Arrival (2016), but also in “Understand” (1991), exploring what would happen if we had a medical treatment for increasing intelligence. Receiving the treatment after an accident, the main character grows frustrated by the limits of conventional language:

I’m designing a new language. I’ve reached the limits of conventional languages, and now they frustrate my attempts to progress further. They lack the power to express concepts that I need, and even in their own domain, they’re imprecise and unwieldy. They’re hardly fit for speech, let alone thought. […]

 

I’ll reevaluate basic logic to determine the suitable atomic components for my language. This language will support a dialect coexpressive with all of mathematics, so that any equation I write will have a linguistic equivalent.

Do you think there could be a “better” language? Or is it just mathematics?

Umberto Eco wrote a book called The Search for the Perfect Language (1994), which is a history of the idea that