Playground Richard Powers Quotes

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.

The world was bigger, stranger, richer, and wilder than I had a right to ask for.

The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting.

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.

Bliss was so simple. Just hold still and look.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Curiosity was the core inner value of all the strongest players.

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.

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?

Every human heart imagines God in a different way. A way just right for that imaginer.

The next day this impossible feeling would begin to seem ordinary.

We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.

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

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'?

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.

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.

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.

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.

For the billionaires, champagne baths every morning and new Lamborghinis every afternoon couldn’t deplete the fathomless amount of cash on hand. “Your entire philosophy of money changes,” writes author Richard Frank in his book, Richistan. “You realize that you can’t possibly spend all of your fortune, or even part of it, in your lifetime, and that your money will probably grow over the years even if you spend lavishly.” There are dotcom entrepreneurs who could live top 1 percent American lifestyles and not run out of cash for 4,000 years. People who Bill Simmons would call “pajama rich,” so rich they can go to a five-star restaurant or sit courtside at the NBA playoffs in their pajamas. They have so much money that they have nothing to prove to anyone. And many of them are totally depressed. You’ll remember the anecdote I shared in this book’s introduction about being too short to reach between the Olympic rings at the playground jungle gym. I had to jump to grab the first ring and then swing like a pendulum in order to reach the next ring. To get to the third ring, I had to use the momentum from the previous swing to keep going. If I held on to the previous ring too long, I’d stop and wouldn’t be able to get enough speed to reach the next ring. This is Isaac Newton’s first law of motion at work: objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless acted on by external forces. Once you start swinging, it’s easier to keep swinging than to slow down. The problem with some rapid success, it turns out, is that lucky breaks like Bear Vasquez’s YouTube success or an entrepreneur cashing out on an Internet wave are like having someone lift you up so you can grab one of the Olympic rings. Even if you get dropped off somewhere far along the chain, you’re stuck in one spot. Financial planners say that this is why a surprisingly high percentage of the rapidly wealthy get depressed. As therapist Manfred Kets de Vries once put it in an interview with The Telegraph, “When money is available in near-limitless quantities, the victim sinks into a kind of inertia.

She did not mind the judgement of others. Her mild contempt for most of her human neighbors made her the most discreet person in Tuamotus. If her beloved songbirds were happy and well, the larger bipeds could rot in the hells of their own making.

people still published paperbound books listing all the most interesting website addresses to type into your browser.

harm I caused you both. But I give you this, this gift that our dead friend here gave me. He hands her the packet. She opens the sheaf of paper and starts to read. A few words in, and she cries out in pain.

The Tempest: Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.

Did something happen to you, growing up? Something you’re trying to fix? Something you need to give to someone?” “I loved computers the moment I saw one. I think I was born this way.” I’d forgotten, entirely, what I loved before I loved computers. Rafi shook his head as I spoke. He knew my roots, every bit as well as I knew his. “No, brother. That ain’t it. But whatever. If it makes you feel good to think so, then think so.

Hope and truth could not be reconciled. The things that had filled her with awe were passing away. There was no other honest ending.

There were insanely different ways of being alive, behaviors from another galaxy dreamed up by an alien God.

He skitters through the schoolyard like a traitor to childhood. He learns the shibboleths—the famous refrains from countless sitcoms, the hooks of pernicious little radio tunes, the bios of fifteen-year-old sexpot starlets he’s supposed to be slayed by. But at night, his dreams fill not with playground battles or the day’s take-down gossip but with visions of tight, lovely code doing more with less—bits of data passing from memory to register to accumulator and back in a dance so beautiful he can’t begin to tell his friends. They wouldn’t know how to see what he put in front of their eyes.

But the book insisted that even the oddest fish was still my first cousin, compared to the other beings down there. The ocean teemed with primordial life—monsters left behind from evolution’s oldest back alleys—ring-shaped, tube-shaped, shapeless, impossible plant-animal mash-ups with no right to exist, beasts so unlikely I wondered if my beloved author invented them.

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?

Johan Huizinga’s classic, Homo Ludens: “At the root of this sacred rite we recognize unmistakably the imperishable need of man to live in beauty.

Games now ruled humanity. Mobile games that consisted of little more than tapping on the screen when a box popped up were destroying people’s lives. Dragon quests with thirty million streaming subscribers.

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. And he opened my eyes to seasteading.

On the strength of its incomprehensible move AlphaGo won the game, then cruised to victory in the match. Part of me exulted in the win. Part of me felt that the greatest game ever discovered by humans had just died. Grappling with the aftermath of Move 37 from my penthouse in San Jose, I felt a shift in the entire contest of life.

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.

FINDING CORRELATIONS in the user data was just Mesohippus—a great breakthrough that was already obsolete.

And these deep players learned the most extraordinary things. They started to drive cars. Without being told a single thing about cats except whether a given picture showed one, they learned how to recognize any cat from any angle under any conditions. They figured out how to translate text from one language to another with uncanny fluency, without being taught a single rule of grammar or usage. They learned these things the way a child would, by weighing the evidence and adjusting the strengths of the connections in their networks of neurons until their brains began to generalize solutions.

And these deep players learned the most extraordinary things. They started to drive cars. Without being told a single thing about cats except whether a given picture showed one, they learned how to recognize any cat from any angle under any conditions. They figured out how to translate text from one language to another with uncanny fluency, without being taught a single rule of grammar or usage. They learned these things the way a child would, by weighing the evidence and adjusting the strengths of the connections in their networks of neurons until their brains began to generalize solutions. 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

Your sea is so great and our craft so small, O Lord.

Power, the mayor decided, was an isolating thing, especially when power was powerless. For

All you do is look for the next best stone to add to the sequence of beautiful moves that you’re unfolding.

WHEN I GOT BACK down to school in early December, I took Rafi and Ina up North of Green with me, to my little carrel on the second floor of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. I sat them down in front of my terminal, which had a direct Ethernet connection to the university’s networked mainframes.

My father just tried to pick the colonizers who offered the best terms.

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

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.

Memory should be vise-like in youth when the emerging navigator needed it most. But no one ever survived into old age who couldn’t open that vise and let much of their hard-gripped facts go free. Evelyne simply hoped that the girl might live long enough to grow

The minute his father disappeared, Rafi headed into the room’s corner and went back through the wardrobe, stumbling into the brute particulars of another, more forgiving and beautiful world. A world, like the lake, that was endless, open, and free, belonging to no man.

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.

She said it simply and hid nothing: diving was the only time she was not going somewhere else, the only time she was happy inside her body and at ease in the world. And so her book felt like going home. Her pages had the salt-breeze smell of the sea, and the words underneath her words teemed like the waters themselves, where nine-tenths of the native species of possible thoughts had yet to be identified.

No, man. You know what the flight attendants say. ‘Put your own mask on before assisting others.

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)

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.

Aristotle said that happiness is the settling of the soul into its most appropriate spot.

But the truth was, I had begun to see things. Not hallucinations, yet. Those wouldn’t come until decades later. But I did see living, changing patterns all the same. In my mind, the backgammon dice began to resemble a creature built up through time, thin at both ends and fat in the middle, not unlike the Little Prince’s drawing of the snake that had eaten an elephant. There was only one way of making a two or a twelve, but six ways to roll a seven. The maker of the world whispered that secret to me, and it changed everything.

Still, she was at peace with it. Memory should be vise-like in youth when the emerging navigator needed it most. But no one ever survived into old age who couldn't open that vise and let much of their hard gripped facts go free.

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.

They camped on the dunes in a gap in the thorny smilax. The sky cleared and spilled out stars. Every breath smelled of silica and iodine. Their fire on the beach was less than minuscule, and its curl of smoke rose into a night too enormous to say. 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.

Half a century later, as the rogue proteins eat my brain and rob me of my ability to remember, I can hold a five-inch flat black slab up to my face and ask, “What is the name of that old toy from the 1970s that created sequences of colored lights for you to copy?” And the little black monolith, always ready, remembers everything for me. Didier Turi held his cell to his face in his office in the Town Hall, next to the open-walled community center. Le Maire listened, punctuating the words of the official on the other end with staccato bursts of, Oui, bien sûr—Oui, certainement. All the while he looked at

Half a century later, as the rogue proteins eat my brain and rob me of my ability to remember, I can hold a five-inch flat black slab up to my face and ask, “What is the name of that old toy from the 1970s that created sequences of colored lights for you to copy?” And the little black monolith, always ready, remembers everything for me.

The course of civilization is carved in ocean currents. Where sea layers mix, where rains travel or wastelands spread, where great upwellings bring deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters to the energy-bathed surface and fish go mad with fecundity, where soils turn fertile or anemic, where temperatures turn habitable or harsh, where trade routes flourish or fail: all this the global ocean engine determines. The fate of continents is written in water.

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.

And on that island, the two of them married and raised a family as well as they could, away from the growing sadness of the real world.

Put on your little beanie cap and don’t release the potato.

That humiliation led to a vow, the vow led to drilling his firstborn son, and the nightly drills resulted in a boy who could read at the Violet level, three years ahead of time

Countless more Makateans lived elsewhere than lived on Makatea.

Impossible not to see him as a gigantic, oceangoing bird flying through the water. No wonder that the people of these islands had long considered these creatures sacred—the spirit guardians and promoters of grace, wisdom, and flow.

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.

No human being knew what life on Earth really looked like. How could they? They lived on the land, in the marginal kingdom of aberrant outliers. All the forests and savannas and wetlands and deserts and grasslands on all the continents were just afterthoughts, ancillaries to the Earth’s main stage.

This game is to chess what singing is to sucking your teeth. It is the summit of contemplative philosophy. It makes chess feel like Chutes and Ladders. Get this. If every atom in the universe was a little universe that itself had as many atoms as the entire universe had, the total number of atoms would still be smaller than the number of possible Go game states. And I can teach you how to play in under three minutes.

invaluable background and insights into that singular island. Guy Stevens and Thomas P. Peschak’s Manta: Secret

Helen Czerski’s The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works got me thinking larger. And the symphonic cuttlefish comes from Peter Godfrey-Smith’s extraordinary Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. My profound thanks to these authors and to the myriad others whose work and play are recombined in this book’s genes.

Aristotle said that happiness is the settling of the soul into its most appropriate