Raphael Thys
Humans love to play. Sports, board and video games, new technologies. We tend to think that play is a recreational activity, it is, but only in part. Play holds a deeper role within our cultures, which is why it’s so important as a human activity. Right now, we are in the play phase of adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) into our societies and cultures.
First we look at the role of play in technology adoption and then we look at why this is important and helpful, with regard to AI today.
As children, play helps us develop cognitive and social skills. If you’ve ever watched a group of children playing games like cops and robbers or house life, they’ll spend more time arguing over the rules, roles and such than actually playing the game. That’s because they’re using language and communication styles to learn how to collaborate. An inherent human social activity.
We do this throughout our lives. When we enter a new job or join a political or a social group. We have honed our play skills and may not see it as playing, but in parts, it is.
We also love to play with new technologies. What became today’s PCs, smartphones and tablets is the result of people playing with computers. That was largely in the 1970’s when the hippies left their communes cause they couldn’t get a decent shower and came back to urban areas. They built computers and played around with them.
A famous example is Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and using phone phreaking devices to make long-distance calls for free. It was a common thing to do then. It was play. Eventually that lead to all kinds of digital devices and to where we are today.
Play is part of how cultures have figured out if they want or don’t want a technology, how it should be adapted to their norms, behaviours and traditions and what role(s) it can play societally through economic models, politics, military etc.
The Play Phase of Artificial Intelligence
If you’re on X (a.k.a Twitter) you’ll see plenty of examples of how we’re playing with AI, as well as Reddit forums, other online forums, Discord and Mastodon communities, LinkedIn, Medium, Substack and well, everywhere.
Some of them are notable scams. Thos “how to make $20,000 a week with AI” are just daft. People do however, fall for them. Much like the snake oils of the 19th century. Being beguiled is part of play. But there are also many legitimate people posting use cases, examples and neat things they are doing.
For decades, AI was a technology largely limited to enterprise corporations, governments and academia. You needed data centres, a lot of energy, special chips and so on. Until the arrival of Generative AI and tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney. Suddenly, AI was available to most anyone.
And like all interesting and revolutionary technologies before, we began to play. What’s interesting this time is that we are playing with AI at a global scale, millions of people, in homes, on trains with their smartphone or tablet. And we can play anywhere, sometimes without an internet connection on our multitude of devices.
This is global play with a revolutionary technology at scale. It is unprecedented. It is a technology that’s reaching into multiple sociocultural systems all at once.
And a large portion of people are sharing their ideas, their projects and what they’re learning. This is helping various AI tools evolve at an incredibly fast pace. More importantly, it helping the broader public to find where and how AI tools can add value. Either at work or in life.
Not only are we playing with actual AI tools, we are also playing with the meaning of AI in our lives, from how it will affect jobs to how we can bring it into the recreational aspects of our lives, the risks, the dangers and the benefits.
It is through such play that we eventually start to truly innovate, to bring forward products and compounded technologies that provide value to society. It is the first step in the process of learning how we want a technology to evolve in our cultures.
Once we start to make broader use of the technology creations that came about through play, we become a little more serious. How they’ll fit into and change economic systems, politics, military, aesthetics (arts, literature, architecture, fashion etc.), social governance.
What is truly remarkable today though isn’t so much AI itself, but that it’s the first time we’ve been able to play with a revolutionary technology across broader, global sociocultural systems in multiple languages and have so many cultures playing at the same time.