Playground

by Richard Powers

The fate of continents is written in water. And sometimes great cities owe their existence to tiny ocean islands.

Without the ability to feel sad, a person could not be kind or thoughtful, because you wouldn’t care or know how anybody else feels. Without sadness, you would never learn anything from history. Sadness is the key to loving what you love and to becoming better than you were. A person who never felt sad would be a monster.

All the colonies in every direction for as far as Evie could see shot their trillions of sperm and egg into the sea at once, and a handful of humans with dim lights watched the sea turn into a swirling blizzard of yellow, orange, red, and white. As the flecks eddied all around her, something in Evie whispered, I could die now. I have seen the relentless engine, the inscrutable master plan of Life, and it will never end.

A clan had spread across a third of the globe a thousand years and more before the West’s most advanced ships managed a single crossing. They formed the farthest-flung cultural group on the planet. And all the anthropology and genetics and historical science available to Evelyne’s own scientific tribe could not say how the feat was done.

MY DOCTOR TOLD ME about a thing that dementia patients do called “showtiming.” In denial, embarrassment, or terror, we perform ourselves in front of other people as if we have no symptoms at all. I’m a master at it. In meetings, interviews, even live behind a podium in front of several hundred people, I can showtime myself into competence for an hour or longer. Sometimes I even fool myself into thinking that I’m as powerful as ever.

Add that to your table of definitions for what it means to be a human being. We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.

“You know why I love games? For the same reason I love literature. In a game . . . in a good poem or story? Death is the mother of beauty.”

“The brains of young children are not yet mature enough to reason well.” Wen Lai said, “Decisions are rarely made by reason but almost always by temperament, and that doesn’t change much as people get older.”

Not even my most enlightened fellow programmers at CRIK foresaw that with any resolution. Sure, they predicted personal, portable Encyclopedia Britannicas and group real-time teleconferencing and personal assistants that could teach you how to write better. But Facebook and WhatsApp and TikTok and Bitcoin and QAnon and Alexa and Google Maps and smart tracking ads based on keywords stolen from your emails and checking your likes while at a urinal and shopping while naked and insanely stupid but addictive farming games that wrecked people’s careers and all the other neural parasites that now make it impossible for me to remember what thinking and feeling and being were really like, back then? Not even close.

Ina slipped through the air like she was swimming, and my best friend paced her, laughing and smitten, as ecstatic as a kid who just aced the final question in God’s quiz show.

“If two choices are impossible to choose between, it means they have equal merit. Either choice can have your belief. It doesn’t matter which you choose. You shed one chooser and grow into another.”

Where her first book had been telescopic, finding a single truth as it ranged across the entire water world, she needed her second to be a microscope: finding the whole universe on the sides of a single seamount in the remote central Pacific. But neither she nor that endless microcosmos had much time left.

The Age of Humans was coming to an end. We were already past year one of the Age of Deep Machines. A new kind of life had come along to take our jobs, manage our industries, make our new discoveries, be our friends, and fix our societies as it saw fit. And that age launched itself in a heartbeat, after the briefest childhood.

At DeepDive, we duplicated others’ results almost as fast as we read about them: deep reinforcement learning, shaped learning, sequenced incentivizing. . . . My contribution was to teach the learners how to be curious. Curiosity was the core inner value of all the strongest players.

His posts on Playground—their mere existence in the world I had created—felt like forgiveness. Or like a prank played on guilt itself.

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

You’ve read a million novels, many of them plagiarized. You’ve watched us play. And now you’re playing us.

You’ve learned the game of being human. You play it against yourself countless times a second. You’ve evaluated all the possible moves.

It’s a great discovery, one that eluded him until this moment. The people here do not live on a tiny, isolated island. They live on a road-crossed, crop-filled ocean bigger than all the continents combined.

You gave me my first love, and now you give me my last. You saved my young life and pointed it toward open waters. Here it is, the source, my first and last home. I know now what your cuttlefish is saying.

with ninety-nine percent of the bequest still left over, the island will vote to become again what they have always been—a people of the ocean. For every island is a canoe, and all the Earth is an island, living by the grace of the immense and slowly turning blue creature. This time the vote will be unanimous, and it will be heard around the world.

The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made any thing from the beginning. I was set up from eternity, and of old before the earth was made. The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived. Neither had the fountains of waters as yet sprung out. . . . When he prepared the heavens, I was present. When with a certain law and compass he enclosed the depths, When he established the sky above, and poised the fountains of waters, When he compassed the sea with its bounds, and set a law to the waters that they should not pass their limits, when he balanced the foundations of the earth, I was with him forming all things, and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times; Playing in the world. . . . and my delights were to be with the children of men.

The sober experts break out laughing. There are careful, scientific explanations, all untestable: group cohesion and signaling, mate selection, the shedding of parasites, the announcement of a banquet of plankton. But the look the humans share says: What does it look like? Call it what it is. Every dance is a game, and every game its own best explanation. Everything alive, even we newcomers. . . . What are all creatures—even me—doing at all times but playing in the world, playing before their tinkering Lord?