PlAi

“I’ve been more interested in whether a problem is exciting than what it will do.” – Claude Shannon

Play is essential for growth. We grow ideas through play. Iteration is not possible without play and failure.

AI provides new avenues for play, and yet it is its playfulness that is most often criticized. We call them hallucinations and most platforms work to minimize or remove them. I see them as an asset.

We don’t accept when AI is absurd because we want it to be serious. There is a general expectation that it should provide us with “answers.” The more interesting product of AI platforms, however, are the questions that it generates.

Our culture finds AI’s ambiguity hard to accept because we have separated “play” from “work.” In the process, we’ve lost sight of or demonized its two essential characteristics: fun and failure. Both “waste” time and generate sunk “costs” on our short-term operations.

Product takes precedence over process. Everything is about commodifying ideas as fast as possible.

Commodified creativity is at the root of many of the criticisms of AI. Extrinsic motivators such as money corrupt so many of our creative systems. Extrinsic motivators such as money corrupt so many of our creative systems. It’s easy to steal a product. It’s hard to steal passion.

This is one of the crucial elements that is broken in our educational systems. School no longer teaches people to play. Cost and a focus on grades turns everything into a high stakes game.

This “game” is not fun and distracts from the play that is central to all authentic learning activities. I was reading recentlyabout concerns that the number of young people reading outside of school has declined since the 1980s.

Our kids no longer consider reading to be playing. Reading is associated with the boring extrinsic motivators in school. Education focuses students on grades over the creative pursuit of learning.

It’s unsurprising that younger people don’t read when they have free time. Social media is not to blame for this. It is the fault of a culture that doesn’t understand play.

This deficit of playfulness extends into their professional lives. A lack of playfulness has profound implications for “innovation” in business.

A love of play unites true innovators. To innovate, you must learn to play with ideas.

In 1948, Claude Shannon authored a groundbreaking treatise showing that all information is reducible to mathematical theory. This was the genesis of the information revolution. All computing as we know it today is based on this idea.

He was also known for his playfulness. Shannon would ride his unicycle down the hallway of Bell Labs, made a device to cheat at roulette, and wrote an unpublished treatise on the physics of juggling.

He never would have broken the information theory paradigm without this playful spirit. Play is essential for looking at boundaries and then pretending they’re not there.

Another playful character who I’ve mentioned repeatedly is Ted Nelson. If you just flip through Computer Lib/Dream Machines, you will catch its playful spirit.

Nelson was poking fun at computing, education, and other structures that personalized computing threatened. This book was central to the personal computing revolution over the next couple of decades.

But why would anybody want such a computer? It’s just for serious business. Jobs and Wozniak, both notoriously playful, thought otherwise. Wozniak wrote in the foreword of a recent book of his experience phone phreaking in the early 70s:

Today a lot of people are computer hackers and a lot of them just want to cause problems for others—they’re like vandals. I was not a vandal, I was just curious. But, boy, I wanted to find out what the limits of the telephone system were. What are the limits of any system? I’ve found that for almost anybody who thinks well in digital electronics or computer programming, if you go back and look at their lives they’ll have these areas of misbehavior. And I think some of the most creative people have all, at some point, focused their creativity on doing things that they aren’t supposed to do. But their goal is usually, oh my gosh, can I discover something? Is there some way to do something that is not exactly in books and not known? (Lapsley, Phil. Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell. Grove Atlantic. Kindle Edition.)

Hacking is play. Curiosity is only possible when we play. Wozniak understood this and used it to propel him into a new paradigm of thinking about computers and systems.

We are at a similar moment now and are struggling to understand the implications of AI. It is playful and refuses to conform to what’s in the books.

Some people think they can make money off of it, but they’re doing so in a very un-playful manner. Woz was never about the money. He was interested in playing with boundaries (but that didn’t stop him from becoming wealthy when he was the first one to explore new games outside the safe boundaries of computing).

We are not looking at AI responses through the lens of playfulness. Most of the products I’ve seen seem to be content playing within the current economic boundaries and so are uninteresting.

The second wave of AI “innovation” seems stalled because it’s not creative. Our extrinsically motivated impulses drive so many uncreative products. There’s deep psychological evidence that those who go into projects focused on the payoff produce less creative, and less innovative products.

Too many of us are more concerned with becoming rock stars than making music. Our systems demand that we monetize every moment of our time. We leave little room for failure and creative play.

A recent article by Stephen Johnson on his use of notebook LM to create a game out of its most recent book shows the potential for playing to understand a topic. My own experiments with Notebook LM were also attempting to create a playful serendipity of ideas.

Creative innovation is possible because we’re both leveraging generative AI to generate playful outcomes. Johnson suggests that “artfulness” might be a defining characteristic of an organization operating in a contextual AI world:

All of which suggests an interesting twist for the near future of AI. In a long-context world, maybe the organizations that benefit from AI will not be the ones with the most powerful models, but rather the ones with the most artfully curated contexts.

Johnson is arguing that organizations need to create contexts for people to play. He is arguing that organizations that use AI creatively to create these contexts will have an advantage of over those that cannot employ the technology in that way.

Generative AI lets us play with ideas. We just have to learn to play ourselves. We’ve lost that.

The Knowledge Navigator project has playful innovation at its core. It’s a tool for playing with ideas.

We don’t play enough because it’s too much work to go sifting for ideas we can play with using current tools. Even when we find them, we accept them at face value because of the sunk cost involved in building them.

Conventional wisdom, based on the blind acceptance of ideas, fills LinkedIn. No innovation ever comes of that. You just see the same thing repeated over and over again.

Humans do not have to be parrots. We are dreamers. Innovation comes from dreaming, not parroting.

The idea behind the Knowledge Navigator is that it scales our ability to play with ideas. If we are going to leverage this ability, we have to let it do the unexpected. Play generates unexpected outcomes. Safe play reduces our fear of failure.

Educators interested in deep learning must build contexts that foster creative play. Business leaders interested in sustaining paradigm-busting innovation must do the same.

True creation and innovation require play. AI reduces the opportunity costs of play, but only if we design systems that embrace notions of fun, ambiguity, and failure.

The problem isn’t in the AIs themselves. Evolution depends on random selection and mutation. Play mutates ideas and challenges boundaries. Those who figure out how to bend AI to play will create the biggest innovations of the new paradigm. They will shift the rules of the game.