Playground

by Richard Powers

Keeping his head while others swelled and broke, making and losing insane amounts of money all with little twists of the palm and flicks of the finger (backed up by delirious screaming), had long ago flooded his cortex with so many surging neurotransmitters that he could no longer function without constant low-level threats to his well-being.

The course of civilization is carved in ocean currents.

Everyone needs to eat, but few people are aware of who sets the table.

If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play.

What is the most important quality any person could possess?

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.

He mispronounced words—but only ones that were esoteric and recherché. That meant he’d spent his years reading beyond any opportunity to talk things over with teachers. The guy had blazed his own trail here.

International waters: That much, at least, sounded very American. The country’s endless desire to escape regulation had driven Ina Aroita to escape America.

OCEANOGRAPHY FLOURISHED IN THOSE YEARS, when the Great Society collided with the Cold War and money flowed into all the sciences. Strange projects that the government deemed worth paying for sprang up with each new season.

What you call the ocean is nothing but the coast. You can go visit it for a long weekend. You can even live alongside it. But you never get much farther than a mile or two from the shore. Your ocean is just the continental shelf, a little bit of spill over the rim of the cup.

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.

That atheism freed up his Sunday mornings and added four more hours to his usable time, leaving him, by his own estimates, almost nine percent more productive every week than if he had been saddled with belief.

But the smartest people in the world gave away their data for free without bothering to read the contract. Data was life. Little in the world was more valuable.

worked for the love of it, the sheer joy, the way I programmed as a boy, to escape the hell of my family and to make a good thing out of nothing. The need to solve an intricate puzzle and the need to quiet your brain are twin sons of different mothers.

To know someone was to have power over them, and my deep learning algorithms were starting to know our users in ways no human could. They could see things in the data that eluded everyone, without blindness or bias, strictly by correlating all the evidence.