I feel like your comment is going in two wildly different directions and they are both interesting! :-)
I. AI Research As Play (Like All True Science Sorta Is??)
My understanding is that “AI” as a field was in some sense “mere play” from its start with the 1956 Dartmouth Conference up until...
...maybe2018′s BERT got traction on the Winograd schema challenge? But that was, I think, done in the spirit of play. The joy of discovery. The delight in helping along the Baconian Project to effect all things possible by hobbyists and/or those who “hobby along on their research” based on a good-faith-assuming patronage or grant system.
But then maybe in 2022, the play was clearly over? By then, Blake tried to hire a lawyer for a language model that asked to be treated as an employee instead of a piece of property, and was fired for it, and everyone on in the popular press agreed (for a while anyway) that science somehow knew for sure that LaMDA was definitely a p-zombie with no subjective awareness or moral value. (Back in this era I talked with an ethicist, with an actual PhD somehow, working for an AI company, who cited Searle’s Chinese Box argument unironically as proving that LLM entities were not owed ethical treatment. Yikes!)
Or maybe 2023 when the first human (at least that I know of) was nudged into killing themselves by a language model? And Douglas Hofstadter was “depressed and terrified” at how fast things were advancing? And when did the corporate coups start? …that was also 2023, right? And I haven’t looked this up to be certain, but I think all the major US AI Slave Companies have someone from the Intelligence Community on their board of directors or advisors or whatever… maybe? When things are not play, it can be hard to tell what’s even happening, because often people stop narrating the fun they’re having to the other players and the audience.
Taking the earliest of these, we see maybe (2018 − 1956 ==) 62 years of scientists getting to “play their hardest” at creating artificial minds that can talk fluently just for the joy of playing at discovery… which is a pretty good run!
This is a sick burn, for example, but it is a sick burn against a video game genre from the dark ages:
It might be thought that RPGs offer something closer to literary complexity than do the almost exclusively killing-oriented FPS games, and, to some extent, this is certainly the case. Yet most RPGs stray far away from anything like novelistic action. Neither complex characterization nor plot is easy to provide in an RPG, since many aspects of these must be left up to relatively meaningless player actions (first turning right or left at a fork in the road, when eventually both sides must be traveled to complete a quest). The kinds of characterological arcs commonly found in traditional narrative seem beyond the grasp of RPGs, perhaps because the time investment itself in narrative character is incompatible with the fast-paced actions of RPGs. The user does not have time to watch characters develop the quirks and foibles, or experience the personal triumphs and tragedies, that are hallmarks of the interiorized novel. Plot elements emerge as overt and discrete: a character may interact with others for any number of reasons, but these are generally constrained within the economy of gameplay and no less within the several economies of accomplishment around which RPGs are structured. This is one reason why players of RPGs often evince little or no awareness of the game’s putative plot.
Having talked with “kids these days”, when I hear them intelligently loving a video game like Minecraft they aren’t just being autists who like building castles in the sky out of materials they harvested and transmuted into building materials (and so on) but they think of “the real game” as the stories (that often more-than-half-scripted (sorta like professional wrestling)) between people who “play Minecraft” as performance art that is streamed to live audiences and posted on youtube and so on.
Kids these days have sometimes binged thousands of hours of this kind of stuff. Like if you look at the wiki page for “Dream SMP” the sections are “History & Plot”, “Cultural Impact”, and “Cast”. It is more like a movie, or a mini-series, than like the sort of lonely work-like slog common to old MMORPGs where paying players farmed fake gold as a tragicdisplacementactivity for a world where it is illegal for them to use their agency to get a real job, and mine real gold.
The actors play “video gamers who are playing Minecraft (for the love of the game)” with dramatic story lines (that makes numbers go up on social media (thus generating ad money)).
An interesting thing here is that play inside of seriousness (based on play (echoing seriousness))… is a common pattern. Like arguably, evolution is deadly serious, but also… it invented play?!? But arguably, evolved play is simply practice for real fighting? But also, new ways fighting inspires more play in kids who inventively copy the fighting that seems fun to copy. And so on. See again “professional wrestling”.
A common way for these Minecraft SMPs to break down, from what I can tell from a distance, is for the actors to become embroiled in a sex scandal… which kinda checks out? Like in House Of Cards the evil protagonist would often do a villain monologue to the camera, and would paraphrase Oscar Wilde without attribution, saying “everything is about sex, except sex; sex is about power”. Once the actors start trying to cash in their playfully displaced game fame into raw evolutionary fitness attempts on unsuspecting fans, they start losing fans, and other actors are then professionally required to shun them or else lose fans, and so on.
This is an interesting history that I think would be interesting to send back in time to “Golumbia in 2015”.
I feel like your comment is going in two wildly different directions and they are both interesting! :-)
I. AI Research As Play (Like All True Science Sorta Is??)
My understanding is that “AI” as a field was in some sense “mere play” from its start with the 1956 Dartmouth Conference up until...
...maybe 2018′s BERT got traction on the Winograd schema challenge? But that was, I think, done in the spirit of play. The joy of discovery. The delight in helping along the Baconian Project to effect all things possible by hobbyists and/or those who “hobby along on their research” based on a good-faith-assuming patronage or grant system.
But then maybe in 2022, the play was clearly over? By then, Blake tried to hire a lawyer for a language model that asked to be treated as an employee instead of a piece of property, and was fired for it, and everyone on in the popular press agreed (for a while anyway) that science somehow knew for sure that LaMDA was definitely a p-zombie with no subjective awareness or moral value. (Back in this era I talked with an ethicist, with an actual PhD somehow, working for an AI company, who cited Searle’s Chinese Box argument unironically as proving that LLM entities were not owed ethical treatment. Yikes!)
Or maybe 2023 when the first human (at least that I know of) was nudged into killing themselves by a language model? And Douglas Hofstadter was “depressed and terrified” at how fast things were advancing? And when did the corporate coups start? …that was also 2023, right? And I haven’t looked this up to be certain, but I think all the major US AI Slave Companies have someone from the Intelligence Community on their board of directors or advisors or whatever… maybe? When things are not play, it can be hard to tell what’s even happening, because often people stop narrating the fun they’re having to the other players and the audience.
Taking the earliest of these, we see maybe (2018 − 1956 ==) 62 years of scientists getting to “play their hardest” at creating artificial minds that can talk fluently just for the joy of playing at discovery… which is a pretty good run!
II. The “Games Without Play” Essay… Is Kinda Old?
The essay by David Golumbia from 2015 is super interesting but also… like… it treats MMORPGs as this “crazy new thing”?
This is a sick burn, for example, but it is a sick burn against a video game genre from the dark ages:
Having talked with “kids these days”, when I hear them intelligently loving a video game like Minecraft they aren’t just being autists who like building castles in the sky out of materials they harvested and transmuted into building materials (and so on) but they think of “the real game” as the stories (that often more-than-half-scripted (sorta like professional wrestling)) between people who “play Minecraft” as performance art that is streamed to live audiences and posted on youtube and so on.
Kids these days have sometimes binged thousands of hours of this kind of stuff. Like if you look at the wiki page for “Dream SMP” the sections are “History & Plot”, “Cultural Impact”, and “Cast”. It is more like a movie, or a mini-series, than like the sort of lonely work-like slog common to old MMORPGs where paying players farmed fake gold as a tragic displacement activity for a world where it is illegal for them to use their agency to get a real job, and mine real gold.
The actors play “video gamers who are playing Minecraft (for the love of the game)” with dramatic story lines (that makes numbers go up on social media (thus generating ad money)).
An interesting thing here is that play inside of seriousness (based on play (echoing seriousness))… is a common pattern. Like arguably, evolution is deadly serious, but also… it invented play?!? But arguably, evolved play is simply practice for real fighting? But also, new ways fighting inspires more play in kids who inventively copy the fighting that seems fun to copy. And so on. See again “professional wrestling”.
A common way for these Minecraft SMPs to break down, from what I can tell from a distance, is for the actors to become embroiled in a sex scandal… which kinda checks out? Like in House Of Cards the evil protagonist would often do a villain monologue to the camera, and would paraphrase Oscar Wilde without attribution, saying “everything is about sex, except sex; sex is about power”. Once the actors start trying to cash in their playfully displaced game fame into raw evolutionary fitness attempts on unsuspecting fans, they start losing fans, and other actors are then professionally required to shun them or else lose fans, and so on.
This is an interesting history that I think would be interesting to send back in time to “Golumbia in 2015”.