AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

Ten science fiction stories by Chen Qiufan paired with technical analyses by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee. Story five, 'My Haunting Idol', depicts AI-mediated parasocial experience replacing authentic human connection — a near-perfect rendering of the circular reference problem: a person whose emotional life is fed by AI simulations trained on emotional data generated by users already consuming AI simulations. The loop is complete; the origin is unreachable. Chen is explicit that AI trained on human data recursively encodes human biases — making the loop not only self-reinforcing but self-amplifying.