Playing with Reality
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $20.99
Publisher Description
Brought to you by Penguin.
A sweeping intellectual history of games and their importance to human progress.
We play games to learn about the world, to understand our minds and the minds of others, and to make predictions about the future. They're also a lot of fun. But what happens when we mistake games for reality?
WIN OR LOSE explores the riveting history of games since the Enlightenment, weaving an unexpected path through military theory, biology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and the future of democracy. As neuroscientist and physicist Kelly Clancy shows us, games have been deeply intertwined with the arc of history. War games shaped the outcomes of real wars in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. Game theory warped our understanding of human behavior and brought us to the brink of annihilation-yet still underlies basic assumptions in economics, politics, and technology. We used games to teach computers how to learn for themselves, and now we are designing games that will determine the shape of society and future of democracy.
Lucid, thought-provoking, and masterfully told, WIN OR LOSE makes the bold argument that the human fascination with games is the key to understanding our nature.
©2024 Kelly Clancy (P)2024 Penguin Audio
Customer Reviews
She’s got game
4.5 stars
The author is an American neuroscientist and physicist (Sheldon Cooper and Amy Farrah-Fowler combined!) who has held research positions at MIT, Berkeley, University College London and the AI company ‘DeepMind’. She’s also invented novel brain-computer interfaces to investigate the biological underpinnings of agency. (Makes you wonder what you’ve done with your life, doesn’t it?) She has written on neuroscience and AI for ‘Wired’, ‘Harper’s’ and ‘The New Yorker’.
In this, her first book, she covers the history of games and their impact on military theory, political science, economics, evolutionary biology, and cognitive psychology, as well as their impact on the development of computers and AI, cutting-edge neuroscience. Hint: not of it is good.
The writing is clear, the narration good, although the narrative does jump around between (often esoteric) topics. I had to keep my thinking cap on. Familiarity with the work of John Von Neumann helped. The author shares his scepticism about the applicability of game theory to economics. That doesn’t seem to have dampened the enthusiasm of most contemporary economists as far as I can tell.