When I was rereading The Three-Body Problem, I came across something Liu Cixin said in Wuzhen in 2018, and it stunned me.

He said that Bitcoin might be an example of technology outpacing science fiction. Looking back at previous sci-fi novels, no one had ever written about something like this. Not even the most imaginative people foresaw that a string of code could become money.

Saying this in 2018 was interesting. Looking at it now, it's practically prophetic.

But what really struck me was the latter part. Liu Cixin said that humanity is migrating from the real world to the virtual world, and blockchain has filled in the missing piece of the puzzle for the virtual world—maybe one day, virtual will become reality, and reality will instead become virtual.

Then he changed tack, saying that AI replacing humans and mass unemployment isn't the darkest scenario. The darkest scenario? It's that humans won't have to do anything and will still live comfortably. Once we fall into this cozy trap, we won't be able to climb out.

Reading this made my heart clench. Because I'm exactly the kind of person who wants to lie in that cozy trap. Scrolling through on-chain news every day, fantasizing about getting rich overnight—isn't that essentially just looking for shortcuts?

In the end, Liu Cixin said he hopes that even if humans become nothing but data in memory in the future, we will still retain whatever it is that "makes us human."

I don't know what that is. But I know I'm losing it.