Playground

by Richard Powers

The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting. The perfect story to tell such a dark and anxious child.

The man-made pieces were ugly. They had killed a bird. Just looking at them made Ina sick. But she couldn’t throw them away. Where could she throw them, anyway, where they wouldn’t drift back on the tide to kill something else?

Phosphate went into making all kinds of things: detergents, construction materials, and munitions. But its effect on crops was world-changing. For fertilizer, nothing matched it. With phosphate, food yields everywhere shot straight up. Without it, civilization faced a Malthusian die-off.

But the land of Makatea ended up all over the Pacific Rim, boosting crop yields in several distant countries. Boosted yields meant rising population, and rising population powered all the breakthroughs, inventions, and miraculous discoveries of the next twelve accelerating decades.

Who could I tell how inexplicable this all felt? I only had this instant. The next day this impossible feeling would begin to seem ordinary. The week after that, I’d begin to forget that anything needed explaining. Then more episodes, lasting anywhere from three seconds to days at a time, when explaining anything to anyone would be harder than I could manage. I needed to start recording everything. Telling someone. That’s where you come in.

Play was evolution’s way of building brains, and any creature with a brain as developed as a giant oceanic manta sure used it. If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play.

“I’m telling you, son. Playing field ain’t level. A black man’s gotta read twice as good as any white, just to get half the recognition. Four times better, and you’ll beat them.”

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.

Only the love that I bore Rafi Young still needs replaying, before the game is done.

He was a creature of scientific rationalism, too moral to suspect what Evie had discovered: eager young girls required camouflage.

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.

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.

And so, the benchmark of human intelligence shifted from chess to Go. Go required deep intuition, creativity, psychological insight, a spark of indefinable genius. In short: all the things that chess was supposed to have possessed just a few years before. All the things machines would never be able to do.

Of all the things we humans excel at, moving the goalposts may be our best trick. The moment advanced AIs get good at that, they’ll have passed the real Turing test.

“You need a little humbling, bro. If I thought for a minute that you might really automate all the things you plan to automate, I’d have to kill you to save mankind’s future.”

Neither Rafi nor I saw what was happening. No one did. That computers would take over our lives: Sure. But the way that they would turn us into different beings? The full flavor of our translated hearts and minds? Not even my most enlightened fellow programmers at CRIK foresaw that with any resolution.

When humankind was gone, the spin-offs of their creativity would provide a resource management game for the rest of creation for eons to come.