infinite games

The thing that people miss, I think, is that the idea of singularity is not merely a technological idea. It is also a cultural idea; a human idea. The singularity is about people, about change, about learning to deal with a newly complex environment.

It is, in many ways, the next big adaptational motivator.

So I find it interesting to read about the human side of all this. How we are coping, how we are adapting as a species and a culture to the things we've set in motion. One of the most significant ideas I've seen coming out of the maelstom is that we can cope better with the technological and contextual change through play.

We are, after all, a game-playing, story-telling species. It makes sense that games are a good method of making sense of and interacting with a rapidly changing world. Not the finite games of winner vs loser that we use to channel our biological aggression and social dominance imperatives - the infinite games that we played as children for the sheer joy of play. The ones which nurtured that invaluable plasticity of mind which will - with any luck - get us through to whatever comes next.