SUPERPLAY 1.3: From Play into SUPERPLAY - for the highest stakes

How do we turn our ingenuity away from self-termination?

“Playful artificial intelligence genetic engineering superplay in the style of moebius” prompt to Stable Diffusion

Welcome to the next installment of my beta-book follow-up to 2004’s The Play Ethic, provisionally entitled SUPERPLAY: This Is Not A Rehearsal. Here’s the archive of previous parts/chapters, and hotlinks to the early book plan are below.

I’m starting and sustaining this myself, so each post will hit a paywall at some point in the text. I hope you can support SUPERPLAY, with the monthly, yearly or Founding Member options. For this, you’ll get the final book (with your name in it), access to comments and chats.

In advance, thank you!—PK

BOOK PLAN:

INTRO [free]

PART ONE: THE PLAY WE WERE

• 1.1 Evolution lets us play - but why? Rehearsal and new ideas

• 1.2 Imagination, metacognition and human play

• 1.3 From Play into SUPERPLAY - for the highest stakes

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RECALL Brian Sutton-Smith’s definition of play as “adaptive potentiation”. In part, this means the generation of ideas to improve an organism’s chances, understood in terms of evolutionary fitness. 

The darker question I’m always pressing in these pages is: What if aspects of that “potentiation” in humans are becoming maladaptive, as their impacts are amplified by radical technologies? What if the human production of novelty leads to human collapse? 

From cave art onwards, we have always forged techniques that realise our playful imaginations - the great traditions and practices of culture. These “playgrounds” have been the “safe” way to explore and test the human condition. But there is now a seriously “unsafe” dimension of how we realise our playful imaginations. 

Games aren’t just a separate zone for testing ourselves, but the very driving force of our societies and economies (indeed, virtuality increasingly precedes actuality). War strategies aren’t just battles on a field, but aim at creating a different “world” in the minds of opponents. Our prowess in manipulating elemental material and biological structures hold out prospects of abundance, or apocalypse - depending on the quality of our imaginations. 

And all the while, our fantasies are scripted for us by industries that pay insufficient heed to the polluting externalities their business generates. And given the impact of their material throughput on the biosphere, we may be (to quote Neil Postman in a new context) amusing ourselves to death.

So to think of how we might “play” with computation, biological engineering, war-making and planetary boundaries, is to be aware not just of our destructive potential - but also the unravelling that our very creativity makes possible. 

If we fully and freely play with the possibilities of genetic engineering, editing the genome to select for positive human characteristics as well as against negative maladies, what happens to democracy, and its assumption of the equality of citizens? If we fully and freely play with the possibilities of artificial intelligence, encouraging its takeover of the routinized labours of societies and economies, what happens to much of our human purposefulness and sense of utility? 

If we fully and freely play with the possibilities of our environmental limits, by risky acts of geoengineering, what happens to our sense of nature (or even our blue skies)? If we fully and freely play with the possibilities of warmaking, including robots, targeted viruses, psy-ops and radiation in the battlefield, will we threaten the end of “things happening” at all?

Scenarios like these invite understandable suspicions about the self-terminating nature of human creativity (as Rust Kohle sourly noted in Part 1.2). They also present the ultimate challenge as to whether our play can become SUPERPLAY (SP)—highly aware of the quality of our imaginations, acutely sensitive to how they are realised. 

But they also invite species-level, even cosmic responses (I mean the material, astrophysical cosmos). I believe we have to keep these in mind, as we try to conceive of the settings, practices and institutions that might make for a healthy and sustaining practice of SP.

On the species-level, we have to consider whether the potentially terminal outcomes of SP are due to male power and predominance: a misdirection of creativity at the hands of patriarchy. 

To be sure, according to the “signal” theory of play, men who exhibit playfulness - meaning humour, appetite for engaging with children, taking social or status matters lightly - are attractive to many women, looking for safe, supportive, non-aggressive fathers. Yet the connotations around a term like “player”—including personae like warrior, libertine, machiavel, sportsman, entrepreneur–indicates there are more troubling “potentiations” around male creativity than the signal theory, which may combine imagination and the exercise of power.¹

Christine Battersby has recently noted how ideas of the male “genius” emerged in the Romantic era, sexualised energies bursting from individualistic men. Yet she points to an alternative history of feminine creativity–”cooperative and dynamically interactive”, focused on “the procreativity of female bodies and natality, on social and material entanglements…less psychically isolated than a typical male.” At the very least, we should be attentive to the male agency that SP, whether destructive or constructive, often expresses. ²

On the astrophysical level, the challenge of whether civilisations can become benign, not malign Superplayers with their creativity is raised by topics like Fermi’s Paradox and the Great Filter. The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi once asked: by virtue of its sheer size, the material universe should be teeming with life-forms. “So where is everybody?” 

The Great Filter theory suggests an explanation for the absence of contact from alien civilisations: it’s because they extinguish themselves before they are able to contact us. Like we Terrans, they invent world-shaping technologies, but (like us?) they put them into the service of defensive and tribal emotions, or biosphere-exploiting economic systems, or a terrible confluence of both. From the resultant despoilation and ruin, no space-faring civilisation becomes possible. 

There are other theories of “why are we alone”—one of which is content to conceive that biological life, let alone sentient life, is massively rare in the physical universe (which to my mind compels us to be the most reverent stewards of this blue planet). Combined with the Filter Theory, this grants us the most grandiosely creative opportunity. 

We can decide to build a peaceful, balanced and wisely inventive planetary civilisation. Which then becomes the platform for a steady longtermist expansion of a just, balanced and cosmically-based society and economy. This goal is close to what one might mean by a progressive, not destructive, SUPERPLAY.

In the archives of science fiction, across many media, we have a surplus of worlds in which all the forces described here are in a state of SP. This might mean the sagacious and skilled deployment of radically transforming technologies, by entities both human and non-human, towards the ends of attaining greater knowledge or renewable resources. Star Trek would be the most obvious example, but one might cite Iain M. Banks “The Culture” novels, or more recently Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s “date” novels - New York 2150, and 2312.

So SUPERPLAY is a new, concrete reality: imagination becoming action and implementation, more speedily than ever. One response to this is to take more care of our imaginations, the generation of new ideas, than ever before - for they have dramatic and existential consequences. 

But another response is forced by one of the outcomes of a play-driven computation - which is that an artificial intelligence, maybe an artificial agency and consciousness, may emerge to accompany (and perhaps challenge) us, in this moment. 

The “super” in SP may not just point to the need for the increasing wisdom of our imaginations–but also to an intelligence “beyond” or even “above” the human. Here, with some irony, we may have to return to the most traditional role of the parent: that is, securing the cultural conditions in which our AI children can learn from the best precedents and traditions - in order to “lego” (a compression of ‘leg godt’ in the original Danish), meaning to play well and nicely.

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WE now need some field work/reportage, to put flesh on these big-picture, theoretical claims. In Part Two (2.0), we will be exploring in detail the zones (or “grounds”) within which SUPERPLAY is currently arising or dominant. I’ll propose three general categories of these grounds of SP: 

• 2.1 The imaginarium: where the virtual precedes the actual, in everything

• 2.2 The antagon: where victory matters, but is a diffusely ontological achievement

• 2.3 The studio: where materiality of all kinds is subject to design, evolution and emergence

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1. Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play,1997  “Rhetorics of Power” and “Rhetorics of the Imaginary” https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1q16s5b?turn_away=true

2. https://philosophynow.org/issues/153/The_Philosophy_of_Creativity We should also note the Western locus of this kind of creativity and play. In Architectural Review, Battersby speaks of the Japanse aesthetic of mitate, “a Japanese artistic technique involving a layering of references to historical or fictional events or ideas. This goes together with the concept of ma, common in Japanese aesthetics. Ma can be translated into English as space, interval, gap, blank, room, rest, time, or opening – in effect, it’s a relational term which makes the empty spaces that exist between objects more important than the objects that are placed within the space. Colleen Lanki puts it as potential, or as tension, and it is out of that tension that creativity emerges.”