Video Games and Your AI Future
The Singularity is made of human experiences and Gran Turismo
At a certain point things become uncertain and all the previous rules fall to the side. At that point our world proves itself to be different than it was. In mathematics most of us barely understand this, but culturally we can sometimes see it. The Singularity promised to us by the speeding changes in technology might be in the distance, but hints of it are already in the rearview.
What does a Singularity point look like in a culture moving from one epoch to another? What does a world infused with advanced machine technology feel like from the inside? It might look a little like a car leaving its track, propelled by an unexpected convergence of generally invisible forces. It might just feel like an underdog finding his way through challenges of class and access, forging his way towards a dream.
Many of us are waiting from some crossover moment in our reality to take place, without quite noticing that we are already moving between realities. Inside of us we synthesize what is true for each of us by moving between worlds. We do this without rocket ships and we do it often from the palm of our hands. For some of us we add a console.
The new reality, one that is infused with technological complexity might have been the realm of science fiction. But now it includes documentary evidence too. That evidence doesn’t come from social media or from the blossoming language and emotions we feel with emoji. The world we are moving into is one we often visit in video games.
Yes, the 2023 biopic film Gran Turismo, detailing the life of professional race car driver Jann Mardenborough, might just give us a great big hint as to how the humans we have been for millennia transform into the humans who are suitable for living the next millennia. It seems we do it one quest at a time.
I have been following Jann Mardenborough for some years because his story was remarkable from the beginning. Mardenborough went from being a video game player to acquiring his professional license through a program started as a marketing ploy. In the process, he and the others like him, who attended a special racing academy, transformed our understanding of gaming’s limits by proving that some of the skills acquired through games could successfully translate into real life skills. The Gran Turismo movie details this beautifully, with an emotional crescendo taking place for Mardenborough and his fellow game players at the legendary track of Le Mans.
Over a decade has passed since Mardenborough helped usher in this new era where simulation worlds and real life become blurred. As this story becomes solidified into our culture through this cinematic re-telling we are called to reflect on a revolutionary moment that many of us might have missed. After all, this breakthrough application of technology didn’t happen in a lab, and it was greeted with a lot of criticism from those who liked the racing world as it was. People tend to like boundaries and predictability and Mardenborough and his ilk proved that old boundaries are not always honored when technology, innovation and human desire combine.
In and out of the game the players go in the film. In and out of the game the boy becomes an adult. The gamer becomes the real world driver and yet the story makes the experience visceral, pointing us to the sticky nature of games. The gamer’s mind and experiences, his hands and his eyes, use all of his history, all of his sense memory to successfully throw off the naysayers and in the end, rewrite the history of a sport. This transiting nature of experience blows up the standard narratives of what is real and what is simulation. Skills that are acquired through play become the skills of a real world career. I like to call this the transreality. It’s the transition space in culture and it is the defining time in history when the worlds of fictional space and the world of real life become one. I borrow the transreality term from a science fiction writer, Rudy Rucker, who warned us that at some point SF and real life would become harder to pull apart.
The transreality is what we are living and the Gran Truismo story helps us understand this with a sense of emotional gratification. It’s a good story for reminding us that all technological innovation that succeeds does so because it provides an emotional and sometimes visceral pull. In this period of mass experience of transreality we move in between the old and the new, between solid world and software worlds and back again, seamlessly. It’s a fusion of worlds and the synthesis point sits inside the human, inside the complex world of individuals. In and out the evolution of humanity happens with every big wave of change providing us with these tiny, individual points where the previous boundaries explode.
When people talk about AI or machines taking us over, they often see that two as remaining distinct but that’s not the way it goes at all. From the pacemakers inside our grandparents to the new generation of sleep-aids that include an implant, we are becoming technologically integrated. Someday we may find that those two devices may need to communicate, and if so, we will want them to do so intelligently. Add to that all the years of gaming and living life with social media, and it seems correct that the boundaries between machine and self will dissipate.
The games of today are the path towards what we will find acceptable tomorrow. Implants that today are purely medicinal might find their way into game-based upgrades. The body of each person might become their “natural” game space, their capacity building control center. In this type of future we will need to protect the rights of the individual so that they upgrade according to their desires and with full autonomy. As we progress in our world these are paramount considerations. But for now it’s also important to take a moment and marvel at the the powerful impact of personal history to make new realities possible in any realm. Nothing blows apart old boundaries of reality like hopes and dreams.
