---
title: "Imagine a Machine Listening Utopia"
---

# Imagine a Machine Listening Utopia

Imagining a machine listening dystopia is easy. We already live in one, like frogs in a pot of water as it boils. In *City of Silence*, the Chinese science fiction writer Ma Bayong imagines a community trying to communicate beneath the threshold of audibility: to learn to speak in silence. But what would a machine listening utopia be like? How would it sound? Is a machine listening utopia even possible? Or does the thoughtlessness baked into deep learning tend towards Fascism, as Dan McQuillan contends? 

Exercise