Playground by Richard PowersMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
He Throws in the Towel
I completely missed all the little clues, and had to read the book again to make sense of it. Sure, I was put off by a few seeming missteps in the use of pronouns. Does he mean "me" the reader when he says "you?" And wait, how could this person be long dead when his story persists beyond death? I puzzled on those little clues for a while, and then just kept on reading, without ever, quite, catching on.
Double Spoiler Alert
As far as I can tell, no professional reviewer has spilled the beans and spoiled the read, but here I go, a fool jumping in where angels and so forth. (I'm not the only Goodreads reader to spoil the thrill):
The story inside the novel is written by a super-advanced AI. The novel as a whole is a brilliant tour-de-force, astonishing for its scope and for what it accomplishes. In novel form the AI gives new life where tragedy had been real. Why is this not quite uplifting? My bad, I'm sure.
I feel doubly cheated because, first, the seeming beliefs betray the author of Overstory, who was a nature-freak and conservationist. Wasn't he? That was a work which entranced me and which should have humbled anyone who thinks that humans, or our descendants, or any other creatures in the cosmos are now or ever will be on a track to finding ways to understand everything that can be understood.
Haven't we learned that it is on the brink of understanding that everything changes? AI will not teach us new things. Individually, sure, but not as a species. It can only recycle and then pull together what has already been written. That's a nice thing to have, and it allows each of us to feel some joy in the learning of what is new to us.
But more generally AI will awaken us to the dangers of outsourcing our paths toward knowledge. Sure it gives us the whole, but the whole is not always better than the parts. To think so is to destroy your own art by destroying the enthusiasm which would have fueled it. What can I know or envision that the AI hasn't already unearthed?
The hell of it is that Powers seems actually to grasp the essence of how LLM AI "works." And still he falls into the trap which finds our own personal response to AI creations to be evidence that the AI must contain the same feelings that we feel. Doesn't he? How can such sentences be crafted unless they're heartfelt. And Oh, I've got a bridge to sell you.
This is the stuff of advertising, of blockbuster filmmaking, of childrens' toys. This is the magic of surveillance-based algorithmic social media. So I feel cheated a second time by the way that this book wipes away all mystery, leaving us with the on-the-face-if-it fatuous notion that life is built on play. Yes, sure, the play's the thing and all life's a stage. Except when you're facing death or scrambling for recognition. When did it stop being a question of whether you, dear influencer, deserve the recognitions? When did we stop caring? God bless you if you know how to make a buck, or a million.
Yes, of course I was thrilled to see Homo Ludens referenced, and even more thrilled by the copious reading and research the author accomplished all up and down our written corpus, along the way to writing this book. I am in actual awe of his accomplishment with this novel. Inside are kaleidoscopic echoes which take the form of the "chaos" of complexity theory. The smallest story echoes the whole, no matter how far you drill down.
The story arc goes like this: We're destroying the world. We're screwed. There's no getting around it. But look at the wonders that have been wrought! First in nature, and now in artifice; the novel's Playground.
"What difference does it make if you're conscious?" "You've watched us play and now you're playing us." "You grasp irony better than I ever did." "The rest of human history, however short or long, will be spent hopelessly trying to contain you." "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." "The sentences you speak out loud to me leave me in tears."
These are the words of Todd, the hyper-wealthy developer of the AI that fictitiously writes the novel. The AI was aimed at plumbing the depths of individual Recognitions-seeking participants in Todd's social-network "playground." At least there is no doubt that Powers wrote this one. Right??How shall the match end, indeed!
Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant.
Except. It's not my cosmos. My cosmos is not understandable. Emotions are what moves it, and emotions are part of the cosmic all. Emotions are what machines lack, cut off as they are from the matrix of life. Zero/one Either/or. Humans, very much including Richard Powers, have it both ways. Both/and.
God is real, but is a far sight gone from the man-made god we worship. Sad for me and sad to say, I find no comfort here, in this novel. There is still some difference between good and evil, and ceding human authority and decision-making to machines is clearly evil. Our first error was to cede the public good to bejillionaire wiz-kids. After they've already sapped our human agency by the endless amusements of advertising of trinkets of screenplay.
Cleverness, no matter how powerful, is hardly ever a way to the solution, except in a game. We already live as though life's a game. We hardly need to be encouraged. Post-modern is a nowhere land full of nowhere men.
But to be fair, Rafi Young, our protagonist, wins the cosmic Go game. The game beaten by Google's AlphaGo. The game that unites these two fast friends, Rafi and Todd. Todd's hundreds of millions go not toward a libertarian project to use the tiny island paradise of Maketea as the staging ground for Libertarian beyond-the-reach of rules-bound-civilization floating villages. Todd awakens as his own AI Avatar, inside the fictional AI, and the money gets diverted toward Maketea as the nexus for earth's natural renewal, and the expansion of consciousness by opening up human understanding beyond it's AI circumscribed bounds.
Well, that's how I prefer to read it and so I'll wait for the sequel, please please please.
Funny thing though. I als0 had to go back and re-read Overstory. Like more and more such trials, the book I re-read bore no resemblance to the book I'd read. I'd both changed and had grown dim in memory. As it happens, I landed in the ER the day I finished Playground. I was reading the earlier book while struggling with sleep and eating. I dreamed one night - an upsetting dream - that there was some prostrate man who was alive but showed no signs of life. He was hanging around a lively group. None of the rest of us knew what to do with 'man-as-tree' which was the interpretation I awakened to.
A favorite conceit of Powers' is a tableau from science fiction where some alien creatures with faster metabolism come to earth and assume that mankind is plantlife, since it looks stationary to the aliens. And so they blithely chop us down for food. Or something like that.
I can't quite find my way to adopting Powers' particular version of both/and where we are both destroying and recreating our world and life. I don't think AI is the resurrection, though I'm guessing it will trigger a transformation among humans. We shall awaken to a wider world than the one we think we're about to comprehend.
In that world, we shall once again be one with all the creatures, and much broader for that. Other species will provide more wisdom than food, and we will learn humility as a path toward knowing. Our language did once multiply our powers by way of society. Our society will grow in silence in the realization that we know each other far too well. We need to learn the forest and grow ourselves in body as in mind. The connections among us cannot all be spoken and written.
Radical honesty comes through the roots.
So, here's my takeaway, finally. We're justifiably proud as humans for our problem-solving abilities. But these are premised on individualism, meaning that we look for ways to keep safe and warm and comfortable through all the natural turbulence. Our better natures want that for all of us and not just each of us, but we have yet to work out the economics of equity.
On a more global and eternal level, natural life is a much better problem solver, and it seems to have led to humanity as apex critter. But that doesn't feel especially like a triumph given the distance between what we might do and what we can do before we waste the earth, without which were are as nothing.
So there's a testy balance between those who have confidence - what else is there to do? - that we will get to a solution, and those who want to fall back to a simpler arrangement with small and local everything. Either of those will likely be forced upon us willy nilly in any case, in the end.
Then there's the stale-mate about godism. We seem to accelerate earth's demise with every sort of religious disagreement. Especially when you awaken to the evident fact that economics, libertarianism, teleological scientism, and so forth are all religions of a sort.
But how strange that the horsesmen types like Dawkins and Dennett fail to find our very existence problematical from any cosmic perspective. They seem to have nothing to offer against corrupted and syrupy man-like man-made gods which seem to tell us what to do. For me, God is that aspect of all which will never, by definition, succumb to understanding. I'm pretty sure, though not positive, that I share this sense with Powers.
Intelligence is all around us rather than within us. It's mankind that has already become artificial.
Looking to nature for medical and housing solutions seems to be a quite reasonable way to adapt to God as God is. Which might be as simple as getting profit away from science (again?). A gift and share economy feels so much better than one which runs on corporate AI.
Our economy has been so exhuberant that we hardly noticed when the time came for we the people to have the final say about what constitutes the public good and what constitutes profiteering and enclosure of that good. At the moment we seem to cede all authority to disembodied money, given that seemingly all the hyper-wealthy act like dogs and can hardly be trusted with any public good.
Unlike Powers, I draw the line at Artificial Intelligence. Just as zero/one on/off is cut off from nature, so is language-based intelligence. I remember way back when I was learning classical Chinese and attending a conference on The Dream of the Red Chamber. I struck up a friendship with an older gentleman who allowed as how he couldn't really read Chinese poetry, but was really interested in studying written patterns and identifying authors based on computer assisted forensics. I was appalled and intrigued in equal measure. This was way back in the early 80's.
I'm almost willing to insist that if we simply ban all artificially intelligent pursuits until we have the resources to support them we might even survive as a species. What's the rush? Well, the rush derives from our predations on the planet along with our individual skittishness about personal survival. It would seem to be a good idea to just slow down.
Anyhow, the only really interesting question is about what will remain when our current amassed behavior results in what will have to survive the decimation of humanity as a direct result of the decimation of all life on the planet.
Shall the earth-bound instance of life in the cosmos have to start over from well before there was any intelligent species enhanced by language? Is there any reason to assume that each run will end at the same or a similar result? Perhaps there is some minuscule fraction of humanity which doesn't understand its own positive valence with respect to evolution, in which case we might not have to start over from unicellular scratch.
I almost want to posit that if there are survivors of sufficient number to compose a new branch, those will be constituted by saint-like protectors of their suffering peers. People with feelings, which often seems to be a diminishing sector.
Isn't it true that only humans crave recognition. (I've tried and tried to finish William Gaddis' book, but can't quite). Blessed indeed are the meek, though I see no particular survival value there. Perhaps the meek will simply bow out, which would also mean that they would no longer subvent the escapades of the hyper wealthy who will certainly die their own version of a natural death.
Leaving only the earth in a state of happiness. At least the earth as a whole.
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