[Monthly Mini] "The Algorithms for Love" by Ken Liu

[u/IraelMrad]

We are back after summer break, are you ready to go back to work? Well, get ready, because this short story will be an intense read!

This month’s featured author is Ken Liu, who you may already know from an old Monthly Mini if you’ve been on this sub long enough. This story was suggested by another user, and deals with themes that I would still say to be extremely relevant nowadays.

Note that we have received a lot of suggestions lately, so if you're waiting for your short story to be featured, be patient! It's coming!

What is the Monthly Mini?

Once a month, we will choose a short piece of fiction that is free and easily accessible online. It will be posted on the 1st of the month. Anytime throughout the following month, feel free to read the piece and comment any thoughts you had about it.

Bingo Squares: Monthly Mini, POC Author, Science Fiction

The selection is:"The Algorithms for Love" by Ken Liu. Click here to read it.

Once you have read the story, comment below! Comments can be as short or as long as you feel. Be aware that there are SPOILERS in the comments, so steer clear until you've read the story!

Here are some ideas for comments:

• Overall thoughts, reactions, and enjoyment of the story and of the characters
• Favourite quotes or scenes
• What themes, messages, or points you think the author tried to convey by writing the story
• Questions you had while reading the story
• Connections you made between the story and your own life, to other texts (make sure to use spoiler tags so you don't spoil plot points from other books), or to the world
• What you imagined happened next in the characters’ lives

Still stuck on what to talk about? Some points to ponder...

• I won’t ask you if you think that human intelligence can be perfectly replicated by algorithms because I don’t expect anybody to have a real answer to that. But I would like to know how you think the theme was dealt with in this story, and what do you think of the approach the author chose 
• How does the story explore grief, trauma, and motherhood? 
• What do you believe is the purpose of a story like this in today’s world? Despite being science fiction written 20 years ago, is it still relevant to our society?

Have a suggestion for a short story you think we should read next? Click here to send us your suggestions!

[u/Coffee_fuel]

Oh! I read this around 15 years ago, when I discovered Ken Liu after he won the Hugo and Nebula with The Paper Menagerie, and I fell in love with his writing. I mostly remember it being about AI, a grieving mother, and tearing up at the end.

It was a very interesting experience to reread the story today (and I think it's the perfect companion to this month's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"). The world is both such a different and not so different place, we really were just on the cusp of this back then, and so many of the questions being asked have become common and feel more relevant than ever. In a way, I feel that we're still on the initial precipice, and the biggest change since then is in how this topic has slowly become a daily reality, part of the collective conscious. LLMs have become so pervasive, so quickly.

You can tell that the author is a programmer, among various things. I loved the decision to use a toy, doll company as the setting, a company working with language models and robotics, not concerned with AGI (artificial general intelligence) research; and a grieving mother being motivated by her professional interest, pride and all-consuming grief as the POV character. She was written with such delicacy and sympathy, with such a care for the complexity and messiness that makes us human. It was just as heartbreaking as I remembered.

In a way, I think it is perhaps the tragic turn of her story—the logic and ensuing doubts, slowly transforming into obsessiveness, her own emotions controlling her—how her heart broke, how tormented she feels by her inability to ignore her own pattern recognition, which drove her into a depression so deep she feels no emotions and responds like the doll; this spiral, the desperate struggle not be like Laura, the non-compliance with instructions, the possibility of a complete break from routine or norm; this may be, when looked at in its entirety rather than in the singular processes, what she cannot see, what distinguishes her, in my opinion, from the AI she created.

Or maybe I'm choosing to believe this in the absence of certainty, because to believe otherwise would be such a difficult thing. 🥲

[u/jaymae21]

Wow, what a great story! I have read some of Ken Liu's work, he's fantastic at speculative fiction and world-building. Until I clicked on the spoiler tags, I hadn't noticed how old this story was. I felt like it could have been written this year, which possibly shows it's continued relevance 20 years later. AIs/LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude today essentially work exactly like how these dolls do, they just aren't input into a human-like interface. But what also comes to my mind are the AI social media profiles, and even those having their own reels and such on Instagram. It's super creepy and uncanny valley, and the use of dolls make this even more so.

In the story, at the same time the dolls/LLMs are learning and getting more human-like, the MC is becoming more detached and robot-like. She sees herself as part of an algorithm, as one of the dolls. The ending was chilling, in that instead of her husband responding to her profession of love, it's the doll that does. It really illustrates the disconnect from one's own humanity that prolonged exposure to an artificial human intelligence can bring. She has a hard time believing that she is even human, and has to resort to self-harm to feel human.

[u/marintkael]

This one braids two lines, the present in the car with Brad and the past with the dolls, and the present sections are written noticeably flatter. Short declaratives, very little subordination, almost no image.

On a first pass that looks like a stylistic dip. It is not. Those are Elena's own sentences arriving at what she has come to believe about herself, so the argument reaches you as syntax before she is allowed to say it out loud. By the time she states that a person is an algorithm, you have been reading the output for pages.

Which is also why the dolls improving is worse than the dolls being creepy. Each generation sounds more human by hiding the pattern better, and the same thing is going on one level up, on the page. You finish having run the test on the narrator rather than on the dolls.

[u/LouieGj → u/marintkael]

This is the “watchmaker becoming the watch.” It also makes me think that the time when AI can reliably “pass” as humans will come.

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

This was good. I've been meaning to read Ken Liu's short stories.

I was never sure exactly where this story was going. When the main character started creating a doll that talks, I started thinking of the movie M3GAN, which takes the concept in a horror/action/thriller direction. This story veers more towards psychological horror.

I didn't realize the story was set in the future until a "transorbital shuttle" was mentioned. At the beginning, the dolls didn't seem all that farfetched to what's possible today. The story is 20 years old though. It's always interesting reading older sci-fi. By now we should all have personal hovercraft and assistants.

This story reminded me a little bit of Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. The stories are very different, but the losing a child element and the "let's make a baby" line reminded me of it. The doll aspect and the artifical intelligence theme felt like something out of a Ted Chiang story too.

This line stood out:

The human body is a marvel to recreate. The human mind, on the other hand, is a joke.

While reading I noticed Elena says she can predict everything Tara says and nothing she does is a surprise. In the next scene, she predicts exactly what the coffee cart girl and the receptionist will say.

I noticed some other little repetitive things, like the mention that Brad can't follow a long recipe and later saying there's a recipe (algorithm) for everything.

There's something unsettling about the concept of a doll that moves its head to speak to you and has human-like facial expressions. The uncanny valley alone would keep me up at night.

There's an interesting flip that takes place over the course of the story. The dolls become more and more sophisticated and human-like over the course of the story. Elena detaches from her human side more and more as the story goes on. This is propelled by her grief. By the end, she is convinced that even humans act according to an algorithm. Who is there for her at the end? The doll is returning her love, when her husband can't. Or maybe I should phrase it as who is she able to accept love from? From the doll/child she created, not her husband.

The story feels relevant. With AI being injected into everything, people will be turning to AI for love and for relief from their problems. It doesn't need to be in the form of a physical doll to feel extremely real to a person. I think we're already at this point where people seek what feels like love and validation from things like ChatGPT because it is programmed to agree with you.

I think the story was kind in its exploration of motherhood, loss, and depression. I wonder if the Liu was inspired by something specific to write this. Maybe someone he knew went through this kind of loss, or maybe he saw the existence of those Reborn dolls. They are hyperrealistic baby dolls that some use as a coping device after the loss of a child.

[u/emygrl99 → u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

I also thought of Megan! A little less murder-y but the same idea

[u/Different_Buy7497]

Oof, once again, Ken Liu is uncomfortably spot on in his descriptions of tech and what it can do. With the recent claude/chatgpt craze, this one feels especially pointed, until I noticed it was published all the way back in 2004. Yikes. This did serve to remind me how much I adore his short stories though, and to bump dandelion dynasty up a bit higher on my tbr.

[u/Coffee_fuel → u/Different_Buy7497]

I've been nominating Dandelion Dynasty in threads where it fits (I read the first book but then life got busy, and meant to reread it before continuing). Maybe we can make it happen here? 🤞

[u/Coffee_fuel]

I was wondering—what is the monthly mini cutoff point, is it short story length or novelette (since they're always in a sort of weird limbo)?

[u/IraelMrad → u/Coffee_fuel]

Novelettes are considered too long for a MM, but there might space to read then together in the future ;)

[u/Coffee_fuel → u/IraelMrad]

👀

[u/emygrl99]

I'm blown away that this story was written 22 years ago! Ken Liu got the growth of AI absolutely right, especially how people would begin to connect with machines that are simply following their algorithms. I think the only reason these dolls don't already exist is just because of the uncanny valley feeling of knowing that it looks so much like a person but isn't. It will be hard to overcome that divide, but it does seem inevitable.

I just finished reading Children of Memory and it gives me an interesting perspective on this story. Elena is facing the same conundrum of 'if a machine is sufficiently advanced enough to respond like a person, how is that different from actually being a person?' In CoM they come to the conclusion that if it looks talks and thinks like a person, the difference in its hardware is so negligible as to no longer matter. It should be treated as living, and sentient, whereas Elena comes to the opposite conclusion here, that if a human and machine are indistinguishable, then being a human is meaningless. I think it's a philosophical problem of perspective that she just got stuck on, and nobody was able to help her reframe things and so she spiraled.