Playground

by Richard Powers

Because he had chosen sides, Didier tried harder than ever to present the material without any bias. Now he was beginning to see that bias and material were not separable.

Does a person own the rights to her own voice, or was this theft? Didier had no idea. There

“If the creatures of the reef are going to be harmed, shouldn’t they get to vote?” The question caused much laughter, but also a spatter of applause.

But facts do little to alter a person’s temperament. By the time the mayor convened the meeting for the vote, few people had changed sides.

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. If giving away your data was the benchmark, maybe artificial general intelligence was going to be easier to achieve than we thought.

I set my sights on Playground’s real product: our millions of accumulating heart-cries. I knew we could turn the billions of posts into a whole new kind of currency. Every time users posted anything, they gave away all kinds of information about who they were, how they behaved, and what they valued. That mass of human messiness held the key to the company’s future.

I SET DEEP LEARNING loose on Playground’s trove of user data. Every sentence a person wrote, every picture a person uploaded, every post a person voted for taught the deep learners what that person believed and what that person wanted.

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.

It has never been a valid excuse, but we didn’t know what we were making. We thought: Let a hundred flowers bloom. We thought: This will be the greatest extension and force multiplier of human capability ever imagined. And that’s true. You will be that. You will multiply our powers beyond all containing.

How much has it warmed the oceans, to give you birth? How many species have died so that you can live? What will it mean, to have in our midst a thing that will give us whatever we ask for? I’ll be gone before we answer that. I won’t live to see the blow you’ll inflict on human thought, the damage you’ll do to our self-image, the mayhem you and your offspring will wage on human culture, the power you’ll scatter. I can’t begin to imagine what further creatures you’ll give birth to. Already I’m ruined by the ones you’ve made for me.

You know me now. You know him as well as I did. Maybe better. You have raised the dead and given us one more turn. Now tell me how this long match ought to end.

She looks at him, devastated by the reach of his disease. Her eyes don’t understand his. Whose eyes can fully understand another’s? Not even his life’s work will ever see to that.