Viet Thanh Nguyen

Because if you watch Apocalypse Now, you know the American soldiers are doing terrible things.

But we see the world through their eyes.

And I was seeing the world through their eyes up until the moment they massacred Vietnamese civilians.

And then I was split in two.

Was I the one doing the killing or was I the one being killed?

And that was when I realized what the true power of stories are.

Not just to save us, that's a sentimental belief, but to destroy us because I felt destroyed at that point.

And that really shaped me.

And I grew up after that realizing that the United States had gone into Vietnam and destroyed a lot of

a lot of places and a lot of people.

But before the United States could ever do that in the name of saving Vietnam and the Vietnamese people, before the United States could do that, the United States had to have already destroyed the Vietnamese through the stories that Americans were telling themselves.

And Americans have always told stories about non-white people, non-American people that justified their destruction long before the United States arrived in their countries and actually destroyed them.

Well, if you appeared as this angel from the future, I would have probably said, I do believe you because you're coming from the future.

And I'm a student of American history to some extent.

And I don't think there's anything we're seeing now that we haven't seen before to one degree or another.

But Americans, probably like most other people, have a good talent to be amnesiac about their past.

I mean, we as Americans have collectively forgotten a lot of horrible things that we have done in our history to our fellow Americans, to the people we've encountered, to countries we've gone to.

So I would have said, well, I'm really sad to hear that this is how things are going to turn out in 10 years.

But I also think that's the logic of American history and society that has taken us here.

Well, I wouldn't have said artificial intelligence necessarily, but I don't think it was beyond the imagination.