Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem: An Editors’ Salon

Los Angeles Review of Books is thrilled to announce the third installment in our Editor’s Salon series! Join us for Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem: A Salon, with LARB editor Julien Crockett and award-winning science fiction writer Ted Chiang as they continue their conversation on AI, language, and the future of technology. Crockett and Chiang will further discuss the ambiguity of language, the nature of artificial intelligence, and Chiang’s approach to turning philosophical questions into story. Artificial intelligence has become a permanent fixture in our lives and continues to evoke evolving philosophical questions: What distinguishes our intelligence from an AI system’s intelligence? What role can AI play in creating art? How can we use fiction to understand the boundaries and moral dilemmas of artificial intelligence? How do we weigh the importance of technological developments with their outcomes? As Chiang observed in their initial conversation:

LLMs are not going to develop subjective experience no matter how big they get. 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.

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An exclusive for LARB members, the Editors’ Salons series offers a deeper look into some of the magazine’s most exciting new pieces through conversations between LARB’s own editors and a range of leading experts and voices in their fields. Don’t miss out on our next salon, Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem, coming up on April 2, 2025, at 6 p.m. PST over Zoom. Register here.

Editors’ Salons are open to all Supporter-level members and above. Become a member or upgrade from your Digital or Print Subscription for as little as $10 a month. Supporter-level members and above: sign in to register!

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Ted Chiang’s fiction has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and four Locus Awards, and has been featured in The Best American Short Stories. His debut collection, Stories of Your Life and Others (2002), has been translated into 21 languages. He was born in Port Jefferson, New York, and currently lives near Seattle.

Julien Crockett is an intellectual property attorney and the science and law editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. He runs the LARB column The Rules We Live By, exploring what it means to be a human living by an ever-evolving set of rules.