Playground

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

When he established the sky above, and poised the fountains of waters, When he compassed the sea with its bounds, and set a law to the waters that they should not pass their limits, when he balanced the foundations of the earth, I was with him forming all things, and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times; Playing in the world. . . . and my delights were to be with the children of men.

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?

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.

Put on your little beanie cap and don't release the potato.' Bart Mannis laughed so hard he almost ran them off the highway. But the meaning was clear, wasn't it? Hold on tight and keep going. Just keep going. Like any good creature of the tides.

Sow the wind and reap the maelstrom.

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.

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

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'?

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)

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.

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.

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.