Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
glad to see ivan illich mentioned here
  

    
(Sidenote: Bruce earlier noted the largest ever hack of personal
information, and the culprit appears to be a 20 year old living with
his parents - he even used the same handle in online games as he did
to release the material:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/08/germany-data-breach-man-held-in-
suspected-hacking-case

"The BKA again said there was no evidence a foreign government had
been behind the attack, with initial reports pointing the finger at
Russia or China."

I'm reminded of possibly my favourite piece of unexpected
consequences from the last few years; how Mirai, the
botnet-of-a-thousand-nightmares, which infected the internet of
things and knocked the eastern seaboard offline, sparking fears of a
nation-state attack was a Minecraft prank gone wrong:
https://www.wired.com/story/mirai-botnet-minecraft-scam-brought-down-the-inter
net/

Next up: STUXNET was actually an ARG for a new Netflix show.
  

    

Ivan Illich...yes. Back in the day when there were truly independent
think-tanks (although that's not quite the right word for his
endeavor) not beholden to either donors or direct or indirect
corporate influence. The simple goal -- improving the quality of
life. "Medical Nemesis" was a breakthrough piece of research.
  

    

cory, hello! nice to see you in here. 

i agree with much of what you wrote about the Authors Guild survey. like
jon, i'm on the fence about Amazon. it giveth and it taketh away.
 
> What are the characteristics of membership of
> the Author's Guild

jon, as i recall, they used to be very chummy and elitist. you could only
get in if you published with certain presses, or had X number of articles
in certain magazines they deemed worthy. if i sound grumpy, it's because
yeah, i wasn't fancy enough for them back in the day, and they turned down
my application. 

nowadays, it looks like they needed more members and began to allow in the
riffraff, including me. on the Authors Guild member site, conversation
threads pop up aboout self-publishing, small presses, vanity presses,
agents, the whole shebang. 

but AG is historically rooted in the sorts of
authors who could and did write for the big publishing houses, back when
that was a more viable business. they say hilariously snooty and out-of-
date stuff in the membership conversation threads. 
  

    

about ten years ago (?) i headed up a discussion at Wordstock, the
then-huge Portland literary festival. subject was something about the
demise of the book, and what e-books might do to literature and publishing. 

people were super into it. we had a nice panel and a huge room, standing
room only. book people *care*, ya know??

while i love books, book people, and some aspects of publishing, i found
myself playing devil's advocate. if the 20th century print publishing model
were to founder and fail, it might not be the fault of Amazon and
"user-generated content." 

it just *might* have something to do with how utterly ridiculous,
parochial, wasteful, and bizarre the old system was. 
  

    
Thanks, MagTiff! That confirms my suspicions... (and you slipped in
that other post, so I was responding to 129).

I suppose the state of the world shouldn't depend too much on Jeff
Bezos, but his company now owns the Washington Post and Whole Foods
Market, and he has another company attempting space travel. On the
plus side, I don't see any real nastiness under Amazon's roof.

It would be interesting to see assessments of the values of large
corporations, the sort of analysis that precedes alignment work. Not
just lists of companies that are "socially responsible," but a real
analysis of values based on actions and decisions. I know people who
assume that big for-profit corporations are inherently leaning to
the dark side, especially those who question the global economic
system as a whole. But I think the whole good/bad thing is
complicated...
  

    
>On the plus side, I don't see any real nastiness under Amazon's
roof.

I guess that depends on whether or not you work for Amazon at a
minimum wage job or not. Their employees are part of the "can only
afford to work here if they get foodstamps" crowd. It gets worse, of
course. Amazon recently announced that they'd make the minimum
Amazon wage $15/hr, which sounds good, relatively speaking, except
that they cut other benefits, starting with the profit-sharing/stock
purchase plan that enabled some of those low-wage workers to get a
stake in Amazon's success. So, overall, a net loss for many workers.

Then, too, there are the people in spaces that Amazon coveted, whose
business were destroyed by Amazon using its size and deep pockets to
undercut them until they either sold to Amazon or went out of
business (I'm thinking of several mentioned in Brad Stone's book on
Amazon, "The Everything Store.)

I'm convinced that this is real nastiness, so must disagree. As with
many things, there is a point where enterprises go from "growing and
innovating" to "cancerous, crowding out others, crowding out
innovation, and killing us all." I think that Amazon is a current
member of the latter space. I don't think that is going to change in
2019.
  

    
So much good and important stuff the last couple of days.  I think
it's worth remarking on the connection between the previous day's
topic of how AlphaZero "uses the whole board" and what Noah Redford
<108> and James Bridle <110> bring up about how much is going on
outside of the North America / Northern Europe viewpoint - hurtling
into the unknown and "change at the periphery."

I agree with Jane and <tvacorn> that climate is a whole different
order of problem-crisis.  I think there are some things that must be
addressed at scale urgently, and there are also some things that can
only be addressed well on the slower value-rich timeline of culture.

Two threads that have been resonating with me and I've wanted to
hear more about are <jonl>'s mention a couple of times of
worker-owned cooperatives and <magdalen>'s series of opening posts
about the journey from the liberal bubble city to a rural
borderland/transition zone.

> <112> My co-op does some of our web development work for large,
global corporations, and I often wonder what it would take to
convert those organizations to a more co-operative endeavor.  I've
never been
close to a large corporation that wasn't operated as a federation of
collaborative teams and divisions, so I tend to think they're really
not far off from what we're doing, though the general structure is
more of an oligarchy.

That's a tantalizing question and avenue.


I still don't know what I want to say about Tiff's posts, except
that your location, avenue of exploration, and approach seem to me
to be perhaps the most important one of all.  Generating something
from our own periphery... or more correctly, going back to the
biological metaphors, at the transition zone between two ecosystems.
  

    
I'll concede there's nastiness at Amazon - I was thinking more at
the level of world-killing, climate-change-denying,
child-labor-employing, toxic-waste-dumping nastiness, but follow
this link for "7 Examples (and more) of How Amazon Treats Their
90,000+ Warehouse Employees Like Cattle"
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/12/7-examples-how-amazon-treats-th
eir-90000-warehouse.html I wonder how a worker co-op would operate, doing the same kind of business?
  

    

> at the transition zone between two ecosystems.

i found myself thinking about the people beyond the USA's borders today,
the good-spirited people who walk across giant deserts seeking asylum
mentioned above. when we talk about the State of the World, of course it is
important to think big, think broad, get around that globe, play the odd
corners with AlphaZero. it's important to recognize also how much privilege
and First World Problem mentality we bring to our stories.

yet there is also value in looking deeply at our own ground. (many Well
members and participants in this conversation are Americans, and many are
West Coast. and Austin. it's practically its own Coast, right?) those of us
with disabilities and unspectacular income levels, those of us sitting
right here raising the children and trying to make sense of our immediate
communities? we are unlikely to have a jet-setting-to-Dubai perspective. of
my own cohort, my friends who're in that category are nearly all white men,
successful in business or technology. i can think of two exceptions, both
highly educated women, one white, one black, neither with children. 

so if you are rooted and/or stuck in place, and that place thrums with
darkness and anger, and you can't escape it drinking champagne in First
Class... what then? for me, the answer is: go into the darkness. walk into
the anger. see what broils up that might be of use. get scared and humbled
but also educated by what's inside. then attempt to move it outward. 
  

    
Jane Hirshfield (jh)

As an aside, Bruce, I have trouble imagining how a person would
experience the "wow" moves of your proposed no-goal chess game. What
conveys the 'wow,' if there is no arc of direction-intention to the
moving? Never seen before? In dance choreography, novelty of
movement brings pleasure, sure, but not least because the limitation
of the human body is being challenged, and also because the history
of dance sits behind our acts of witness. In the case of a computer
playing a board game, wouldn't it all become entirely arbitrary and
meaningless? Constraint's breaking is a kind of pleasure--but only
if the constraint's presence is felt. The serotonin dopamine
explosion of aesthetic pleasure is dependent on there being *some*
context of customary expectation's transcending.


*Thanks for indulging my aesthetic issues here, Jane.

The problem you’re describing here —  the “arbitrary and
meaningless” issue —
was once rather nicely summed up in 1986 by noted musicologist
Morrissey of The Smiths, who wrote:

“Burn down the disco, hang the bloody DJ, because the music they
constantly play, has nothing to say about my life.”  

And indeed I get where he’s coming from.  Clearly there’s not much
direction-intention, or even physical instrument-playing virtuosity,
in a highly technical form of music that lacks emotional lyrics and
is mostly made of repetitive loops, samples and the occasional
innovative sound-design honk, beep or squonk.  

However, I listen to rather of lot of techno dance music and its
associated minigenres of house, neurofunk, drumnbass, jungle, etc
etc, mostly because I’m trying to figure out what you could say
critically about them that might be broadly helpful.  Given how much
human element they’re missing, why and how are they good?  Because,
even though they’re not Morrissey, they’re plenty popular, and
lastingly so.  They’re supporting Ibiza’s economy, even — there are
discos here 50 years old.

Very similar problems apply to abstract motion graphics based in
code art, like say the visual code-art works of “Lia.”  Why don’t
you just watch a real movie, where the boy kisses the girl and
there’s some cool action scenes? Where's there's conflict, something
that matters?

Well, we’re very keen on the creative work of Lia at Share Festival
in Turin, so the natural question is, like, why her and not somebody
else?  Is she “good?”  Yeah, she is, but why?  She’s never up on
stage emoting like Morrissey.
  

    


One compelling reason might be that Lia’s just plain there.  She
exists. “Lia” is that rare creature, a professional code artist. 
She quit her day job teaching new-media in an Austrian design school
and now Lia survives on… well… embossed coffee-cups, lecture fees
and kickstarter, I guess.  She does derive some revenue from
“SeditionArt.com,” which is a commercial gallery for works of
digital art.

*So here are the commercially available code-art works of Lia.  I
myself “own” a lot of these, or at least I paid modest sums of money
so that I have the rights to display them on devices.  Lia gets a
50% royalty, and I’m keen to keep the former professor busy in her
code-art racket.  It gives me something nice to think about.

https://www.seditionart.com/lia

I do like these artworks, just in the simple sense of my sincere
fondness for abstract motion-graphics.  But I own lots, mostly so
that I can enjoy trying to figure out which is the “best” one.  

I’m pretty sure I could sit down and rank them as my personal
favorites, from 1-44, in half an hour.  Not a big problem — I know
what I like.

But what would I *say* about them that would justify that? What kind
of aesthetic argument can I make?  “If you want to own the best Lia
work, wow, you should buy that one.”  That’s possible, am I right? 
People can assess Jackson Pollack canvases. It’s “action painting,”
you know, you want the splatters.  Any proper gallerist ought to be
able to advise you on that.
  

    


So the business with the chess analogy is me attempting to strip
this problem down to something more conceptual, less human-centric. 


So imagine you’re in a big dark installation, like, say, a big disco
that Morrissey just burned down.  And there are big columns of
colored light in there, from the disco’s light-show special FX.  And
the tall, glowing lights move around you in the space.

The first time, they just float colorfully and randomly.  But the
second time, they begin in two neat ranks, and then they make
various different short motions on what seems to be a grid.  
Sometimes, two collide and one vanishes, until they’re almost all
gone.  

Even if you didn’t recognize this display as a chess game, it would
surely be prettier than the random, arbitrary and meaningless
lights.  If you had those two graphic motion displays going in two
adjacent rooms, the audience would leave the random room and go into
the chess-simulation room.  Because it’s just more engaging, there’s
more to talk about, it’s cooler, it’s got more frisson, it’s just
more artistic.

Eventually, you could run a hundred different light-show chess games
in a row, and the unwearied and always-interested viewers ought to
able to declare, “Wow, #47 was pretty awesome while #32 just wasn’t
as good.”  Without knowing that #47 is Capablanca Vs Alekhine 1927
while #32 was Carlsen vs Caruana 2018.  

They’d come up with a new aesthetic for this generative art
experience, in other words.  But what aesthetic is that?  What’s it
about?

Special bonus: me, way back in 2013 trying to give a pep talk to
media artists who do code graphics.  Basically it’s me riffing at
them, “Well, I sure take you guys seriously; can’t quite tell you
why, though.”  

People in an unusual and innovative line of work appreciate a
back-patting, but really, I ought to be able to tell them why.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1636630114/clouds-interactive-documentary

  

    
*More from Noah Raford, who offers a music recommendation.

From: Noah Raford

The other thing I wanted to add is man, this revolution is going to
be funky. All the best parties happen in the dark. 

All you need to do is listen to some of the music coming out of the
cracks right now to get a feel for the celebration that is coming. 

Yes, times are tough and will get tougher, but when the going gets
tough, the tough start to party (to paraphrase good old Hunter S.).

Have a listen to some of the crazy amazing music coming out these
days. It’s the sound track to the crumbling 20th Century and will
gives a hint at all the fun, grey market things to come. 

Nyege Nyege Festival 2018 (in Uganda)
https://youtu.be/QMtobL0TwLQ

If the future looks like Nyege Nyege, bring it on, baby! The worse
it gets the funkier it will be. 

Let’s not forget that even woolly old Dark Mountain started as a
festival and all the best house parties happen in squats. 

Unlike the US (where Bruce rightly points out that more people are
above the age of 60 than below 25), the opposite is true in the
places where the future is really happening. Half of the continent
of Africa is under 16 and boy, are they going to want to party. 

There will still be rocket barons and space sheiks making grand
plans, but for most of us, we either succumb to VR intoxicated self
pity and prescription  or rip off the headsets and join the bonfire.


The future is going to be one big squat party. In times of sorrow,
what else can we do but sing? 

Best,
Noah 
  

    
Well, now I'm going to have to add neurofunk to my ever-growing list
of neurologisms. Thanks Bruce. 

And thanks Noah, this is the State of the World, not just USA and
EU. Nevertheless, I have more to say about the USA. Leonard Cohen
said we like it dark (and he had the wisdom to die the day before
the US election). 

In the 80s and 90s University of Hawaii professor Fred Riggs wrote
several articles arguing that Presidentialist political systems are
prone to authoritarianism.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/019251218800900401

Maybe prone is not the right word. At one point, according to his
analysis, out of 33 Presidentialist systems, 32 had become
dictatorships. I'll leave you to figure out the one that didn't (at
that point). The only thing that has kept the US from fulfilling the
destiny of its political system structure is the adherence to
democratic norms. Those norms have held back the dogs of structure
for some time. 

I also attended a conference at UT Austin organized by Sandy
Levinson in January 2013, titled "Is America Governable?" The answer
of a group of staid, sober constitutional law professors, Brookings
researchers and such, was...NO!

Well, SOTW, here we are in 2019, with a normless and gormless and
formless leader, and his followers. I'm not sure we can rescue the
US from it's systematic destiny at this point. The Gov Futures Lab
at IFTF held what we called the ReConstitutional Convention in April
2013 that brought together a wide group of thinkers and doers who
cared about political systems designs to try and prepare for the
coming transition and to have new governing ideas to experiment
with, rather than falling back on tribalism, theocracy, or worse, as
happened after the Arab Spring. 

A movement of social inventors is what we were and are trying to
catalyze. And as we get closer to the day when those inventions will
be necessary, our urgency needs to be amplified. Noah points out,
rightly, that other places are getting along, for better or worse,
and thinking about brighter futures, rather than cursing the
darkness. And yet the energy that is about to be released from the
US will spill out and ripple through the entire planet. 

To me, for the US, we are beyond sustaining the system. Trump only
exposed and exploited the weaknesses, he did not cause them. We are
facing a near-term system fork of transformation or collapse. My
money is on collapse (which Dator sometimes calls "silver linings"),
but my brain and heart are working toward transformation. And if
it's not coming from the US champagne supernova, hopefully we won't
get in the way of the future happening elsewhere. 

Fork well, and prosper. 
  

    
Jeremy Smith, a very smart former Army engineer, gave a talk last
night at an EFF-Austin meeting. EFF-Austin is a cyber liberties
organization, the only attempted chapter of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. Bruce and I have both been involved with it over the
years, and I'm still on the Board of Directors. I had invited Jeremy
to talk about Register2Vote, a 501c4 that's built a web-based
platform (MapTheVote, https://mapthe.vote) to extend voter
registration more or less organically via the social graphs of its
users - the virtual equivalent of word of mouth. The system combines
data about citizens, where they live, and whether they've registered
to vote. Via MapTheVote, you can see who's not registered in your
neighborhood. You can wander over and encourage them to register. If
you're a licensed volunteer deputy registrar (VDR), you can walk
your neighborhood and register people then and there.

They've started with Texas, but there are plans to build out
technology to support other locales. The idea is to make sure
everybody has an option to vote, where registration is required. 

The same organization built a web app called Register2Vote
(https://register2vote.org/) that makes it easy to register. Because
legally, you can't register online in Texas, the app gathers the
information to create and print the voter registration form, mails
it to you to sign and date, and makes it easy to mail to the proper
authorities.

Once people register to vote, the challenge for all parties is to
get their advocates to the polls.  I saw during the midterms that
Democrats were using an app called MiniVAN to drive their
get-out-the-vote canvassing efforts. In the past, they would carry
paper - lists and maps - but MiniVAN provides a list of people who
voted in past Democratic primaries, along with maps, to facilitate
the canvassing efforts. Here's info about that app:
https://blog.ngpvan.com/team-canvassing-minivan  I'm sure
Republicans have something similar. Less sure how actively the
Libertarian and Green parties are canvassing.

The state of politics today in the US owes much to the fact that a
lot of people don't vote, especially in midterms. Here's a
reference: https://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101
~60% vote in presidential years, ~40% for midterms. Citizen
engagement is persistently relatively low, voter apathy is a
problem, and more recently, vulnerability to toxic memes has driven
voters to make what ill-informed decisions (understatement). 

I'm not sure there's a uniform definition of what it means for
politics or government to "work," given the diverse and polarized
opinions about what's what. But I think these uses of technology are
a step in the right direction. But it's not enough to make sure
everybody's voting, if they don't understand the implications of
their vote. So I think the next step, behind the work that guys like
Jeremy are doing, is more of a challenge: engaging and informing
potential voters at all levels, cutting through the political noise
and helping them to fact-based decisions. 

This is a US-centric post, and I appreciate that we're talking about
the state of the world. I think activists in support of the American
form of representative democracy, despite current evidence of its
corruptability, believe that it's what's best for the rest of the
world. Is that true? Are we better off driving governance with the
wisdom of crowds? The Trump era's given us an opportunity to
consider whether we'd rather have an authoritarian regime, and it's
surprising how many US citizens are ready to go that route. Where
would we be if we'd elected a more competent version of Trump? Is
his administration an anomaly or a trend? And what of the ascendance
of authoritarian leaders elsewhere in the world?

Listening to Jeremy speak last night - a super-competent, very wise
tech-savvy fair-minded hard-working person trying to make things
better by making politics more fair, I was feeling hopeful.
  

    
Bruce, interesting reply, and I almost referenced Pollock in my own
earlier post--I remember so distinctly the moment, long ago now,
when one of his canvasses transformed for me, as I looked at it, and
I suddenly entered the pleasure of it, which had been closed to me
until that moment. I was altered, permanently--which is one of the
more central functions of art, for me: that moment when new
possibilities of being fling themselves open. Not the only function,
but one of them.

But you were talking in your original post (the one I was answering)
about a potential increased "wow" factor in watching a computer play
a game of chess in which there was no longer the concept of winning
at all. Think of the moves possible then!  In your defense of the
arbitrary's beauty, you still use the word "game." And if there's a
game, there are rules that give it its pleasure. That's all I'm
saying.

The beauties of arbitrary or chance construction can be
considerable. (As can the unbeauties.) Our brains and senses evolved
to find certain experiences entrancing, and the range of those
experiences is broad. The ripples of a river running over rocks is
more satisfying than some ever-repeating single pattern. The
predictable becomes boring, and eventually invisible. 

The music is called "neurofunk" because there's a connection to our
neural response to it.

But that wasn't what I was replying to and questioning. I understood
you to be saying that the "wow" of the *chess moves* could be even
larger. That particular kind of "wow" might be replaced by another
kind of aesthetic pleasure--but it's no longer the wow of the chess
game gaining more possibilities, when it isn't a chess game. The
pattern-generating is coming from some other process.

The intersection of aesthetics and decisions about how to live in
our shared world and its many cultures might be an interesting area
to explore. Does an increasingly non-hierarchical sense of painting
and music foster cooperative corporations as a possibility, for
instance? Does the aesthetic valuing of the uncharismatic object and
ordinary moment, in and for itself, change our sense of what is
"meaningful" in larger ways? Does the possibility of equality and
tenderness between humans increase when we find the "flawed" more
lovely than the "perfect"? I would wager that it does, though I
doubt I'm able to make a non-intuitive case for that.



 
  

    
Good God but that's a brilliant post, Jane, full of questions that
are more interesting than any answers would be.
  

    
Climate change has been mentioned a number of times. It’s really the
game changer as analysts like to say, the elephant in the room as
Jane has pointed out. Allowing the mainstream media to define the
semantics and the tone was probably not ideal. The term itself is a
euphemism when it needs to be a powerful meme and more accurately
descriptive. Margery Eagan of Boston Public Radio has suggested
“climate disruption” which moves the needle a bit more. But I was
pleased to hear Nancy Pelosi use the term “climate crisis” in a
recent press briefing.

Just a quick level set as we like to say in tech: a few things that
were mentioned but will hopefully get more airtime. These are all
major factors and not simple externalities in the futurist's
toolbox. No picture of the future can be complete without
considering them:

-- CRISPR and designer babies (new cover story, Time magazine)
-- The viability and ethics of brain/machine research
-- Smartphones, VR and their effects on community and social
cohesion
-- Exit strategies from the surveillance society
-- The limitations of social media and future direction

Further, I’m not convinced that the global/local meme is out of
steam either politically or otherwise. This needs to dovetail with
the climate crisis dialogue in the sense that highly disruptive
events will continue to happen in local pockets thereby shifting the
emphasis for remediation back to the local level. This may seem
obvious but has lots of secondary implications. In “Digital
Mythologies” I argued that tools for electronic democracy should be
leveraged locally first rather than in maximum participant large
tents like FB. But of course the market gravitated towards
large-scale approaches that were simply more profitable. No surprise
there. That said, there’s a still great opportunity for more
software tools to be developed that take the challenges of localism
into account --- robust tools for organizing, self-help, disaster
recovery, local funding and so forth.  Nextdoor is a start but IMO
there's a world of opportunity in this space and it’s puzzling that
it took so long to develop.
  

    
Bruce and Jane, I think what you're both trying to get regarding the
game might be covered by James Carse in his Finite and Infinite
Games.
<https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Finite-and-Infinite-Games/James-Carse/9
781476731711>

I don't have it at hand, but the difference between the two for him
begins with finite games having winners and losers and infinite
games being played with the point of expanding the field of
available possibilities (and generating their pleasure and meaning
from same).
  

    
Thank you all for this discussion! I'm following along as I have for
probably the last decade, and even signed up with the Well to take
part.

I'm very interested in the swing to "New Dark" by Bruce, and all the
talk of the Dark Mountain Project and Ivan Illich, especially in a
discussion led by the very founders of the Viridian Design Movement.
(For what it's worth, I think these are all important sides of the
environmentalist movement.)


@Tom, I completely agree about the need to shift away from social
media for local organisation, and I'm sure there's room for
localised social media networks to aid with things like disaster
recovery.

That said, there are some quite mature and well-used tools for local
political organisation. The community bike shop I'm involved with
uses and open-source tool called CiviCRM. A great many other orgs,
both large and small, use NationBuilder. Speaking locally, the
tenants union in my city managed to spin up over two years from
nothing into a major force in municipal politics. This was heavily
aided by having their own tool for constituent engagement.

So the tools exist, they've been around for nearly a decade, and
they are in widespread use. And they are the exact opposite of (big)
social media -- just humans contacting humans, a single, siloed
database per organisation, and no algorithms trying to manipulate
users' emotions. You just don't hear about them as much.


Regarding CRISPR babies, He Jiankui's bumbled attempt this year was
classic TED Talk/Silicon Valley/techbro hubris. There's a great
article tearing apart the actual science here:
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/11/28/after-such-knowledge

(It's still a thing on the horizon, though, for sure.)
  

    

Excellent Kieran. Good to know and thanks for pointing that out. I
hope they gain more mind share and traction going forward.
  

    
Via email from Matthew Battles:

I'm struck by the sense that an AlphaZero game is the 2D shadow of
something happening in a multi-dimensional space. This is an
aesthetic of shadows, a light-show aesthetic; we've come back to the
shadows dancing on the wall of the cave.
  

    
Nicely put, Natthew Battles.

AlphaZero is a champion at two-person games where all information is
known. Breathtaking, in its limited way.

Life is not two-person, nor is all information known.
  

    

"Life is not two-person, nor is all information known."

*That’s entirely true, Pamela, and yet deep-learner AIs can beat the
crap out of people in games that have lots of human players and also
big random and hidden elements.  Doesn’t seem to be any deal-breaker
for 'em; Deep Mind’s other engines can’t play “Capture the Flag” as
well as their AlphaZero engine plays chess, but they can play it
quite well, and even brag about it in the ol’ blog here.

https://deepmind.com/blog/capture-the-flag/

*Bots, even pretty modest and simple ones, can play all kinds of
video games that are formally impossible to solve, computer-science
wise.

https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/29/a-look-back-at-some-of-ais-biggest-video-ga
me-wins-in-2018/

*There are even people who enjoy watching AIs playing multiplayer
shoot-em-up games on social media.  

*I can remember when it seemed a little weird that people would
passively watch a role-paying game rather than participating in it,
but now “Twitch” is major-league media.  There are armies of sports
fans on the couch for sports that are played on the couch.  Makes
you wonder, eh?

https://www.twitch.tv