A Note from the Editors: We’re pleased to share a preview of this spectacular essay by Jen Zhu, courtesy of our friends at Persona. To read the rest, visit Persona and subscribe!
I was born and raised in one civilization and have spent my adult life in another. This vantage point lets me see what each culture cannot quite see in the other — and never more so than now, as both are being reshaped by machines that appear to think.
Last month, the Aspen Institute’s Technology Leadership Initiative, which brings together Fellows, selected from the leading edge of AI and frontier technologies, to explore and think deeply about the challenges of the digital age, gathered in Aspen, Colorado. We read the books and encountered the ideas I was raised on. (Persona is supported by the Aspen Institute but is not affiliated with the Technology Leadership Initiative.) The Creative Qian and the Receptive Kun of the I Ching. The usefulness of what is not, from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. The woodcarver, from the Chuang Tzu. These readings do not hand you answers; they plant deeper questions. China, the world’s oldest continuous civilization, has been asking what a tool is for, what a person is, what we owe nature, and what we owe each other, for 3,000 years. The people now leading its frontier technologies assume that grammar, the same way that Americans assume that the freedom to become is the spirit of the nation — what makes America both a nation and a proposition, extraordinarily so.
There is a word in Chinese painting: Liu Bai (留白), the art of leaving blank. The painter leaves the silk untouched and calls it mist. The empty space between the mountains is not the absence of a picture; it is the picture’s breath. Lao Tzu says the same thing, more plainly, with a wheel. Thirty spokes meet in a hub, and the empty center is what turns the wheel. A vessel is useful on account of its hollow. What is there gives a thing its form; what is not there gives it its use.
This is a strange thing for a machine age to remember. . . .
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