Los Angeles Review of Books

SCIENCE FICTION has historically had a contentious relationship with scientific development at the same time that technological products coming onto the market have long relied on rosy narratives for their further popularization. AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future (Currency, 2021), the latest collaboration between science fiction author Chen Qiufan and former head of Google China and current CEO of Sinovation Ventures, Kai-Fu Lee, sits solidly at the intersection of these narrative selling points -- and a selling point is exactly what is being made here. Artificial intelligence, Lee claims in the introduction, is "the world's hottest technology," while Chen posits that "[f]rom the past era to the present day, the unstoppable force of AI has been revolutionizing every dimension of human civilization." Enthusiastic about their vision for a world transformed by AI, the two collaborated on what would become a sort of call-and-response example of "scientific fiction" (as opposed to "science fiction") in which Chen contributed 10 short stories focusing on individual aspects of AI technology set within the next 20 years, while Lee follows up with an explanation of that technology in the present -- how it works, how it is applied, and how it is likely to develop in the coming decades. As a textual product, it is both entertaining and informative, imagining a world that feels at once both familiar and radically different from our own.