Playground

by Richard Powers

MAKATEA’S FATE WAS SET in stone in 1896, a few years after France annexed the island and added it to its growing Pacific empire. That was the year when Sousa wrote “The Stars and Stripes Forever” for a country that had just committed to separate-but-equal. The year that Daimler built the first gas truck, Röntgen snapped the first X-ray, Puccini premiered La bohème, and the soon-to-be Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius published a paper showing how rising carbon dioxide levels would soon cook the planet’s atmosphere.

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.

Nothing in life matched a game of catch between cousins whose last common ancestor had lived 440 million years ago.

She loved it all, even humans, for without the miracle of human consciousness, love for such a world would be just one more of a billion unnamed impulses.

She fed him that classic bit of Quebecoise wisdom. “Attache ta tuque et lache pas la patate!” “Meaning?” “Put on your little beanie cap and don’t release the potato.” Bart Mannis laughed so hard he almost ran them off the highway. But the meaning was clear, wasn’t it? Hold on tight and keep going. Just keep going. Like any good creature of the tides.

The year was 1957. Pepsi was offering to help the modern housewife with the hard work of staying slim. Alcoa announced a bottle cap that even a woman could open—without a knife blade, a bottle opener, or even a husband!

At night on the open ocean, in the pitch-dark, under several thousand stars: there was no other way to understand the size of the planet, the extent of the universe, the playing field of life.

Her cryptic water world was nothing but propositions, down to the bottom.

Every business beyond a certain size grows its own hive mind. The company itself will find a person who can implement its collective will. And the people at the helm will be convinced of their own agency, just as I was.

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 now it’s up to us, evolution’s most intelligent children, to help it figure out how to engineer immortality. Defeat the design flaw of death: that’s the last and most important step of evolution, after which life will be complete.

“That’s what he calls the Common Task. The one thing that can unite all the people on Earth, whatever their histories: Working to learn everything there is to learn, so we can defeat death.”

“So Fyodorov thinks . . . he believes that the evolution of intelligence gives people the unique ability to introduce reason and purpose into nature. There’s no reason why we can’t someday learn to kill death itself. I mean . . . evolution has been changing the rules since the beginning, right?”

Do I think that all of evolution is embarked on an adventure to learn how to undo death and raise the dead? You bet.”

I teetered between rushing my creation into the world half-baked (risking that someone would do it better a few months later) and waiting until my creature was perfect (risking being scooped by a similar platform that was good enough).

Find the moves that the rules forgot to outlaw.

my father had told me once that a man’s worth was measured by how much money other people were willing to let him lose. And a corollary: the strength of a man’s character was measured by how much he was willing to lose on others’ behalf. I suddenly had character to spare.

“What’s more important: the journey or the destination?” Either answer was fine with me. I was just looking for how much bounce the candidate was willing to put into it.

We humans are built to compete, built to spout opinions, built to seek prestige and shiny, built to watch our accounts and ratings grow, built to impress our friends and vanquish our enemies. Or maybe we’re just built to play.

“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.”

To carry forward the incredible rash of expansion that the Fourth Industrial Revolution had unleashed, we needed sovereign, self-forming, self-governing, opt-in platforms where the populace themselves were free to meet their fullest potential by applying themselves to their strongest creative desires.

I added that to the long list of things that people said could never be automated.

For centuries, the island has always hung flowers around the necks of its destroyers.