Ray Nayler: Don't Be Afraid of Your Own Depth

I’m not great at advice—I share Oscar Wilde’s opinion about it, for the most part—but with that caveat I’d say this: don’t be afraid of seeking. Don’t be afraid of your own depth. Don’t dumb yourself down to be less threatening to others. Don’t let the shallow present monoculture shame you into vacuousness.

I see fiction as an architecture for asking complex questions, not a place for providing answers. And that works well for me, as “providing answers” isn’t generally something I am interested in doing.

If you asked me for a definition of what a human is, I might respond that the human is, more than anything else, a technological animal. From the moment we picked up a rock and used it to alter our interaction with our environment, we have been shaping technology—and have been shaped by it.

I’m not scared of AI or hopeful. I don’t think those words really matter: it’s like asking whether it made sense to be scared or hopeful about the printing press, or the first written alphabet. Humans continually invent things that are immediately beyond their control, and we are doing so again. The world those inventions bring about is something