Playground Quotes

“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“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.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“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.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“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. 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.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Bliss was so simple. Just hold still and look.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“The world was bigger, stranger, richer, and wilder than I had a right to ask for.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“What began, centuries ago, as a healthy safeguard against projection had become an insidious contributor to human exceptionalism, the belief that nothing else on Earth was like us in any way.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“The editor knew that no one had ever lost a sale by underestimating the desire of the reading public to read at a simpler level.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“A hunter’s moon pulled at the willing water, crashing it against the edge of the continent, and the pulse of that liquid piston was better than any song.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“The ocean was forever unfolding, forever exploring, forever tinkering with form, and every part of it was busy talking about what was all around. So was she. So was every being that came from those waters. Which meant every living thing.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Curiosity was the core inner value of all the strongest players.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Everyone needs to eat, but few people are aware of who sets the table.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Every human heart imagines God in a different way. A way just right for that imaginer.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Aristotle said that happiness is the settling of the soul into its most appropriate spot.” I doubled down on my belief that computer scientists should never dabble in philosophy. “What does that mean, exactly?” “What makes you happy, Todd Keane? What’s your work? How do you define a day well spent?”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“There was so much to life, too much, more than Beaulieu could do justice to, more than any living thing could guess at or merit. 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.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“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?”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“People in my field always talked about “human equivalence” as the gold standard for machine intelligence. 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.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Sow the wind and reap the maelstrom.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“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.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“No, man. You know what the flight attendants say. ‘Put your own mask on before assisting others.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“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." He stopped and twisted to face me. "Know what I'm sayin'?”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“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.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“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. (155)”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“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.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“In her rising tide of panic, Evie could not understand how her husband remained so weirdly reconciled. He never once voiced regrets or spoke of goals unsatisfied. Once, he said, “Wouldn’t it be something, to see what Danny’s children are going to be like?” He surprised her, waking from an afternoon nap and asking, “What do you suppose Dora will end up doing?” When she didn’t answer, he added, “Now, that’s something I’m sorry I won’t see!” Other than that, he was packed and ready.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Hope and truth could not be reconciled. The things that had filled her with awe were passing away. There was no other honest ending. Blocked, she reread what she had written so many times it made her ill.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“I used to measure out my weeks on a calendar app shared with four assistants, where every quarter-hour box was filled in with multiple colors of appointment. Now my calendar app is a red plastic stick of seven sequential pill compartments embossed with the days of the week. And even with that handy tool, I sometimes stop and ask my phone: Did we do Tuesday already?”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“The next day this impossible feeling would begin to seem ordinary.”
― Richard Powers, Playground