Hi, I'm Lovar Burton and this is Lovar Burton Reads.

In every episode I hand pick a different piece of short fiction and I read it to you.

I like to say the only thing these stories have in common is that I love them and I hope

you will too.

One of the things that speculative fiction offers us is a way to process that which has

happened and that which is yet to come.

And one of the most brilliant speculative fiction writers out there today, and this is my

opinion, is Ken Liu, who you all know as the author of the paper manadtery and Mano

No Oare.

Both stories that I've read on this podcast.

I personally cannot get enough of this man's writing and I'm in luck.

We're in luck because there is a brand new collection of his out right now entitled The

Hidden Girl and Other Stories.

Today's story is from that collection and there is a phrase or an idea actually called

the Singularity.

In this case, we're talking about the technological singularity and the idea is that as things continue

to evolve, there will come a point where they evolve out of our control which is to say

beyond any idea we ever could have held for the future of that technology.

And I believe that when we talk about artificial intelligence, that that is the sort of thing

that's going to deliver civilization into the age of the technological singularity.

Now some folks project forward to say, well, what happens to humans, to human brains when

that moment occurs?

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