FUTURE Vol02Issue02

Albert-László Barabási

Tibor Fischer

George A. Tilesch

Ken Liu

FUTURE

Welcome to the Future

AUTHOR

/ʃaːndor jaːsbɛreɲi/ Sándor JÁSZBERÉNYI

(1980, HUNGARY)

Welcome the Future

Sándor Jászberényi is the author of The Devil Is a Black Dog: Stories from the Middle East and Beyond (New Europe Books, 2014). In 2017 he received Hungary’s Libri Literary Prize. As a correspondent for Hungarian news sites, he has covered the conflict with Islamic State, unrest in Ukraine, the revolutions in Egypt and Libya, and the Gaza War. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Magazine, AGNI, and the Brooklyn Rail. He divides his time between Budapest and Cairo.

The most unpleasant thing about the future is that it is unavoidable. I am a father, forty-three years old, with a thirteen-year-old son. He has the skills to use digital technologies in ways I never could have imagined, and undoubtedly will never learn. Which is not to say that I am technologically illiterate. On the contrary, I use an array of modern devices, and I keep up with technological innovations. I simply have a radically different stance, when it comes to new technologies, than my son’s generation. I regard them as tools, whereas my son treats them as natural parts of everyday life. The most alarming thing in the generation that has grown up with social media, innumerable apps, and big data, is the naturalness with which they embrace the new technologies.

“What was life like before the internet, dad?” My son has asked me this question a couple times. He doesn’t really want an answer. He’s just trying to remind me how old I am. From the point of view of the impending future, he is quite right. I lived the era of the internet, the dawn of cell phones, social media, and apps galore. We are now living the revolution brought on by artificial intelligence, which will have grave implications for the arts.

Algorithms which rest on amounts of data inconceivable or at least unmanageable for the human mind write short stories, essays, and novels. They complete unfinished symphonies and paint paintings. Humankind is both celebrating its marvelous technological advances and stumbling back in terror as we look on.

The issue of artificial intelligence and the uses to which it can be put became a problem for me long before I had thought it would.

At The Continental, we are proud to work with some of the best visual artists in Central Europe.

We started the year by winning the Silver Award for Print Editorial category at the International Design Awards. Dániel “Lobov” Németh, our designer and visual editor, has certainly outdone himself. I would say The Continental Literary Magazine is one of the most beautiful literary magazines in the world at the moment. And the jury of the International Design Awards agrees.

The visual materials for each issue are chosen by the editorial team after considerable research and debate. It is hardly enough for an artist to be excellent. His or her work must engage with the theme of the issue and the texts by

our authors. This was never a problem until we started putting together the issue which has “future” as its theme.

One rainy winter morning, someone in the editorial office threw out the idea of feeding the articles in our future issue into a moderately high-end AI and instructing it to create the illustrations for the magazine.

Somewhat to my dismay, several of my editors supported this idea. They started a wild search among the best universities in the world to find the best algorithm and the best programmer for the job. And they did. The images that they put in front of me were remarkably interesting, though I confess, I felt an inscrutable sense of unease as I perused them.

I couldn’t decide whether to use these images or not, so I asked for a few days to reflect. I then had several long, sleepless nights. I tried to consider the question from all angles, and in the end, I declined.

As much as I would like to be, I am not a rock star, and unfortunately, I had to give a more detailed explanation of my decision than Nick Cave did with his.

A few weeks earlier, Cave had been shown a song written in his style by an algorithm. “This song sucks,” he said, and thus he brought a hasty end to the debate concerning the abilities of artificial intelligence to write songs. Alas, an editor-in-chief of a literary magazine cannot resolve a question with such a curt response.

My main argument against images made by AI was that they are not works of art. It was not pedantic aestheticism or a rigid adherence to something old that prompted me to reach my decision, but rather a fundamental philosophy of the arts. One can argue about whether a given composition is a work of art, but there is one thing you cannot argue about.

Works of art can only be made by human hands.

Sentient, thinking, animate beings, with hot blood throbbing in their temples. The ability to create a work of art is the privilege of the homo sapiens, and human artworks are interconnected. They reflect on one another. They evolve.

An orangutan may spread beautiful colors across a canvas and may well create something that looks like a painting, but we can remain quite sure that it is not a work of art. There may be innumerable promptings behind the creation of

Sándor Jászberényi

a single work of art, but this work of art must speak to its creator, and to its creator’s brethren. No orangutan in the world has ever run to show his paintings to other orangutans, who would then gaze on them with a sense of cathartic release. No, when animals paint, they do so for humans, and when they seem to reflect on the evolution of human art, again, they do so for humans, and for the banana they get as a reward, of course.

My suggestion to the editorial team was to use the algorithm’s code as an illustration instead of the AI images. It was written by a human, after all.

They voted down my idea, of course, so we stuck with the tried and tested flesh-and-blood visual artists. The unsettling images by Botond Keresztesi proved an excellent choice.

The future, alas, is worrying. The theme of the first issue of The Continental Literary Magazine for 2023 is the future, but we were not planning on producing a sci-fi anthology. We leave that to the book publishers. We sought simply to explore as many different ways of looking at the problem of the future as possible, including the ways it appears in literature and other forums. Naturally, we did not exclude the science-fantasy genre.

As Isaac Asimov reminds us, “science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.”

The future will undoubtedly be shaped by changes in the sciences and technology, but science and technology are just two factors in the complex brew of how we envision something that does not yet exist but someday will.

The war in Ukraine, global warming, human rights issues, and the Covid epidemic have all influenced the way we see the future.

I don’t think I’m giving away any great secret when I admit that, according to our editors, the future does not look too bright.

On the issue of artificial intelligence, White House adviser George Tilesch has written an excellent essay in our issue on whether the algorithms we use can really be considered intelligent.

Harvard University researcher Albert-László Barabási spoke with us about predicting the spread of future pandemics and whether we might face another

pandemic like Covid in the foreseeable future. (Barabási and his colleagues’ work was instrumental in shaping US Covid policy). He also spoke about the roles of networks in our lives and in the arts.

Tibor Fischer has contributed an excellent essay on cryptocurrencies in which he asks the poignant question: is it time to forget about traditional currencies?

In what is perhaps the only essay in the issue that could be characterized as hopeful, Robert Menasse writes about the future of Europe. Optimism about the future is currently regarded with deep suspicion. Menasse captures the irony of this with an apt citation from Nietzsche in the title of his essay: “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

We are proud to include works of prose by distinguished American and Central European authors, such as Ken Liu, Botond Markovics, Alexander Weinstein, and László Darvasi. They touch in their writings on problematic issues, such as whether a baby born out of the womb can be considered a real child, how to nurture relationships after cataclysm, and the workings of post-trauma societies.

My favorite moment in this issue, however, is not an unsettling question but a surprising statement. “We were as careful as we could be, considering ours was an off-the-grid mission riding the rails into enemy territory, but David still got pregnant.” So begins Sam J. Miller’s short story, and I could not help but wonder, as I read these words, how long it had been since I had come across such an exciting opening sentence.

We have not come any closer, of course, to knowing what the future will look like, but I can assure our readers that, once they have finished this issue, many things will be familiar when this future comes.

The war in Ukraine is still going on, with no end in sight. More than 300,000 people have already died as a consequence of Russian aggression. The numbers can be hard to grasp. One might do better to imagine 300,000 cheeseburgers and consider that each one represents someone who has been robbed of his or her future since the invasion began. The future, Leonard Cohen claims in his world-famous song, is murder. However bleak things may seem at the moment, let us hope that he was wrong. ¶

The Edges of Wilderness

Edges

AUTHOR

/kɛn liu/ Ken LIU

(1976, CHINA)

Ken Liu is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he wrote the Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series, as well as short story collections The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. Prior to becoming a fulltime writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Liu frequently speaks publicly on topics such as futurism, machine-augmented creativity, history of technology, bookmaking, and the mathematics of origami.

Ken Liu

With a thunderous roar, the plane tilted up and soared into the sky, its silver profile warped by the shimmering air spewing from its engines. Even from across the bay, a mile away, the takeoff was so loud that the group of spectators covered their ears.

The plane shrank in the sky and eventually vanished. The crowd dispersed, chatting among themselves excitedly. One family tarried.

“I can’t believe people used to live here while thousands of those things came in and went out every day,” said Noah, a lean, muscular man. He swept an arm at the abandoned buildings around him, with trees poking out of ruined rooftops and great blue herons gingerly stepping through the marshy patches that had once been lawns and streets. A few beavers sunned themselves on half-submerged walls. “How did they not go deaf?”

“My grandmother grew up around here,” said Isla, his wife. “She told me it was the smell that she remembered. The fumes would carry all the way across the water.”

Next to them, their daughter, Hannah, who had just turned ten, gazed longingly at the empty airport and said nothing.

“And we complain about one flight a week,” said Noah, laughing. “But, no more. That’s the last flight out.” He turned to Isla with admiration. “It wasn’t easy, but you did it. You shut it down.”

Isla smiled. “I wasn’t the only one. But yeah, I’m proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish. This was the last active airport in the Commonwealth. We’re finally free.”

“The water looks nice,” Noah said, gazing longingly at the sparkling water in the bay. Summers here were so short.

“I’ll race you!”

Isla grabbed her bag from her bike and ran toward the changing rooms on the edge of the rocky beach. What could be better than a bracing swim in the sea after a long bike ride and watching the end of an era?

“Do you want to join us, sweetheart?” Noah asked Hannah as he also got his bag from his bike. “Or maybe you’d like to go check out the marshes? The beavers do really interesting construction in coastal waters.”

The Edges of Wilderness

“No,” Hannah said. “I don’t feel like swimming or exploring.” She glanced at the sky, as if searching for something. “I’ll just stay here and browse on my terminal. You and Mom go have fun.”

Noah hesitated at the dejected profile of his youngest daughter, knowing she was thinking of one particular passenger on that last flight. “Listen,” he said, “it wasn’t up to Kai. Her parents decided they wanted a different life for her and for themselves.”

“I know,” Hannah said. She took out her terminal and put up the privacy shades.

Noah sighed and went to join Isla in the clear blue sea.

At first, Hannah and Kai talked every day. Through a telepresence drone (size of a cat, with eight legs and an omnidirectional camera rig), Kai showed Hannah around her new house in Cape Town. Hannah wasn’t used to the complicated controls, and Kai got impatient with her for not being able to keep up.

“It’s hard to see where I’m going,” Hannah tried to explain. “The window on the screen is so small and I have to switch between camera feeds all the time.”

“That’s why you should get a VR rig,” Kai said. “Even a really cheap one will be better than your old terminal.”

“You know my parents won’t allow it,” said Hannah.

“Yeah, I know,” said Kai. “Not gonna lie, but I don’t miss the arguments between our parents, especially not the death glares your mom used to give mine whenever we returned from a vacation outside the Commonwealth.”

Kai tried to slow down so that Hannah could keep up. But even after Hannah got used to the clumsy keyboard controls for the drone, playing tag or hide-and-seek this way wasn’t nearly as fun as they hoped. It just wasn’t the same as when they were together in person: you could hear the little creaks in the floorboards, sense the subtle changes in air pressure, feel how your friend was creeping up on your super secret hiding place, and it was all so exciting that you wanted to scream and laugh at the same time.

The future is easy because will arrive predictably

/ɒlbɛrt laːslo: bɒrɒbaːʃi/ Albert-László BARABÁSI

(1967, ROMANIA)

Albert-László Barabási is a network scientist. Mostly based in Boston, where he is the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science at Northeastern University and holds an appointment at Harvard Medical School, he also runs a European Research Council project in Budapest at Central European University. Barabási’s latest book is The Formula (Little Brown, 2018). He is the author of Network Science (Cambridge, 2016), Linked (Penguin, 2002), and Bursts (Dutton, 2010).

future easy because it arrive predictably

INTERVIEWED BY BALÁZS KERESZTES ON DECEMBER 22, 2022

Albert-László Barabási

Is there a principle that can help us understand phenomena as diverse as computer networks, electric circuits, biochemistry, pandemics, or the number of friends we have on Facebook? Network scientist

Albert-László Barabási gave us some insight into the magical world of network science while we chatted about COVID, the ecological crisis, future prediction, and— surprisingly—the role of the arts.

The future is easy because it will arrive predictably

When we look at your career trajectory, we see that you came from Transylvania and ended up in the United States. You move constantly between Boston, Budapest, and Transylvania. Can we argue that you live your life in a peculiar network of places and cultures?

The way I often think about it is: my home is in Transylvania, I live in Budapest, and I work in Boston. These three places have different meanings and define different patterns for me. I’m mostly in Boston for work, where my social interactions are limited to colleagues and professionals, and even though I do have friendships and stronger ties, they all come from people I have worked or am currently working with. In Budapest I have a much more heterogeneous social network. That’s where I go to have fun—fun beyond work. That’s where I do much of my art. The people I work with in Budapest are mostly involved in the art world—young (and not so young) artists who help me develop the ideas and the artworks that we make. And of course, home is Csíkszereda, Transylvania, where I’m from and where my mother still lives. My wife occasionally says that I totally change my behavioral patterns in Transylvania. There’s no place where I can relax and turn off as I do there. I behave and relate to people very differently in the three places. I do like heterogeneity.

As an editor and literary critic reading your work, what struck me first is how you use stories and anecdotes to explain complex phenomena and abstract scientific ideas. Do you have an anecdote about how you realized the importance or relevance of networks?

Let’s talk about storytelling first and then about networks. I grew up in a family that was not related to any technical field at all. My mother was a theater director, my father a historian and writer. When I started university in Bucharest, I worked at the magazine A Hét, a weekly national magazine in Transylvania in the 1980s. I was a writer before I was a scientist. And an artist, because before I discovered physics, I was preparing to be a sculptor. This love for writing and clarity has stayed with me. When network science came around and I ended up writing my book Linked, I was not starting from scratch. I had a solid background in storytelling across different magazines.

Editor-in-Chief

Sándor Jászberényi

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