Ted Chiang is one of the most celebrated and influential science fiction authors working today. He is the recipient of every major award in the field—the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, four Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, a Sidewise Award, a British Science Fiction Award and six Locus Awards—as well as receiving significant recognition for his work beyond the field. In 2024 he won both the PEN/Malamud award for “excellence in the art of the short story” and the American Humanist Association’s Inquiry and Innovation Award. He has also been internationally recognized by the German Kurd Laßwitz Award for best foreign work in science fiction, which he received for his story “Hell is the Absence of God.” He is the author of two collections of short fiction, Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) and Exhalation: Stories (2019). The title story from the first collection, “Story of Your Life” (1999) was adapted into the highly acclaimed film Arrival (2016), directed by Denis Villeneuve.
Chiang is also a prominent public intellectual writing on the topic of artificial intelligence. In 2023 he was named as one of the 100 most influential people in AI by Time Magazine, who described him as “as one of the sharpest critics of AI and the corporations behind it.” In influential essays such as “Silicon Valley is Turning into Its Own Worse Fear” (Buzzfeed 18 Dec 2017), “ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” (The New Yorker 9 Feb 2024) and “Will AI Become the New McKinsey?” (The New Yorker 4 May 2023) he offers incisive commentary on the corporate forces behind recent AI discourse, drawing on his characteristic talent for perceptive metaphor and rigorous extrapolation to make visible what real risks are posed by AI and how most popular fears are better understood as anxieties about the capitalist ethos in which AI is emerging than consequences of the technology itself.