The Gamification of Reality: How Play Shapes Our World and AI’s Future

The book “Playing With Reality” by neuroscientist Kelly Clancy explores the profound influence of games on human thought and the development of artificial intelligence, offering both praise and critique.

Games as a fundamental human instinct: Clancy argues that games are more than just an invention; they are an instinct deeply rooted in human nature, serving as a tool for the brain to generate data and build better models of the world:

• From birth, children engage with playthings to sample sounds, textures, and sensations, learning the rules of the world through a game-like process that reinforces discoveries with dopamine neurons.
• Clancy asserts that human intelligence is profoundly insatiable, with games unveiling the sheer force of this desire throughout history, allowing people to discover new parts of themselves, find moral limits, and shift understanding of themselves and others.

The limitations and dangers of game theory: While celebrating the role of games in human development, Clancy is critical of how game theory has been interpreted as a measure of human intelligence and used in military forecasting:

• Game theory treats all participants as rational actors bound by the same rules and desires, failing to account for the complexity of human behavior and the possibility of departures from neat assumptions.
• An overreliance on game theory contributed to the U.S. failure in Vietnam, as computer simulations could not conceive of guerrilla warfare, with one of the pioneers of game theory later warning of its limitations and arguing it had made the world worse off.

The foreboding prehistory of AI: Clancy presents the failures of game theory as advance warnings of the dangers of AI, which attempts to simulate reality through brute computational force and mobilizes the same blinkered logic of maximization:

• Game theory laid the foundation upon which AI was built, and its shortcomings threaten to exacerbate the possible dangers of AI, such as accelerating surveillance, data harvesting, optimization, and attention-grabbing.
• Clancy likens AI at its current stage to a young child, hungry for data and always wanting more, with artificial agents endowed by researchers with a desire to win that might ultimately undo us all.

Broader implications: “Playing With Reality” serves as a thought-provoking exploration of how our fascination with games has shaped our understanding of the world and the development of artificial intelligence. Clancy’s critique of game theory and its influence on AI raises important questions about the limitations of these approaches in capturing the complexity of human behavior and decision-making. As AI continues to advance and play an increasingly significant role in our lives, it is crucial to consider the potential consequences of relying too heavily on game-like models that may fail to account for the nuances of reality. Clancy’s book encourages readers to critically examine the games we are playing, both wittingly and unwittingly, and to imagine designing better ones that truly reflect the depth and plasticity of human intelligence.